Tomorrow I’ll go back to telling truths that will make the progs and lib’rals mad at me. To honor God, I do try to refrain from doing battle on the Sabbath Day. By obeying His commandment to rest on that day, we proclaim our God’s sovereign lordship over His creation.
Among the pleasant memories that lower my blood pressure are the quiet Sundays of my childhood and, whatever the weather, the Sunday color comics. Crack of the bat and clink of horseshoes in the summer; Sunday school and maybe an afternoon at the movies, if my father was willing, in the winter: but in all seasons, the funny papers.
My folks stuck to the local New Jersey papers, but my grandparents, both sets of them, got the New York Daily News, so they had New York comics. I read those, although a few of the strips in the New York papers, like Moon Mullins and Gasoline Alley, I couldn’t quite get, and one or two others, like Smilin’ Jack, struck me as vaguely sinister. But our local papers didn’t have The Teeny Weenies or Smoky Stover, so I couldn’t afford to ignore the comics in my grandma’s Sunday paper.
But here at home, every Sunday–aah! Prince Valiant: Hal Foster’s spectacular artwork made the Age of Arthur come alive for me–and it still is. Mark Trail midwifed my lifelong fascination with bugs and snakes and other critters. And does anyone out there remember The Little People? And not forgetting one of my all-time favorite lines on a Sunday afternoon: Mandrake gestures hypnotically… And then there was Peanuts.
Stretched out on the floor, quietly reading the comics–there was something to be said for that. Not that it did me any spiritual good, that I know of (although certainly Mark Trail was for me a gold mine of information about nature); but I have since learned that I belong to my Lord seven days a week, for every minute, and I don’t think He minds if I enjoy some undemanding fun on a Sunday.
But those old comics are gone, and the new ones are distasteful.