“Dead flies give perfume a bad smell.” Ecclesiastes 10:1

One of the problems with consistently giving thanks is that there are “flies in the ointment.” Before modernization it was really hard to keep the flies away.   An Iowa woman named Hannah Harger invented the screen door in 1887. Imagine preparing food or perfume before the advent of the screen door or the ability to seal our environment with modern air controlled environments.  A perfectly good thing or moment could be ruined by flies, especially dead ones.

“A fly in the ointment” has come to mean “a drawback that was not at first realized,” or “a minor irritation that spoils the enjoyment of something.”   “A fly in the ointment” is the discouraging pattern for almost all things positive and almost anything worthy of praise.  The document our team has proofread five times comes back from the publisher with a couple of misspelled or misplaced words.  The perfect evening with the spouse is interrupted by an emergency that has to be tended too.  A laborious and lengthy announcement about the upcoming ladies tea next month disrupts the church service that was flowing smoothly toward a victorious conclusion.  My excitement over one of my own greatly anointed sermon gets diminished by someone pointing out that people asked them to please explain to them what I was trying to say up there.   Another pin in the balloon moment for me, the preacher, is, “do you realize you preached for 47 minutes, not including the response time.”   It’s hard to keep the flies out of the perfume. I guess we need screen doors for life, not just our houses.

Gratitude has to be a firm decision or the flies in the perfume will rob almost every situation of a reason to say thanks.  Some of you who read this on Thanksgiving Eve 2013 need to brace yourself for the pest that will show up between now and noon tomorrow.  One year while preparing for bed on Thanksgiving Eve, I dutifully went around turning everything off before bed, including the oven.  I didn’t think to look inside to see the slow cooking turkey.  (I think we had about 30 guests coming to the house that day.)  I don’t think the metaphor of “a fly in the ointment” quite captures the enormity of my transgression that day.

Now you may think I am going to recommend a “hallelujah anyhow” attitude toward stinking things in our sweetness, but I will not.  Try as you may, you won’t be able to convince everyone to ignoring the rotting flesh of dead flies in the sweet thing they had their heart set on.

To keep your praise on you need to do two things:

…#1, build a screen door.

What I mean is get better at keeping the “flies out of the ointment”.  I have noticed the longer I live the better I get at avoiding unpleasant surprises.  I have listened to my critics and worked hard at preaching in a way that minimizes confusion and improves listener response.  We videotape a lot of our announcements and we give very clear instructions to anyone taking a microphone during a service about how much time they have.  We’re still working on the document-proofreading problem but we are determined to make errors the exception instead of the rule.  God bless Hannah Harger, whoever she was.  “I’ll bet her husband was going, “Hannah, what are you doing, don’t you know flies have been coming into people’s houses for the last 5,887 years?”  “We just have to live with em.”, Hannah said, “go finish plowing the back 40, I’m building a screen door.”

Cheri and I used to always have stress on holidays because I was looking forward to waking up and having nothing to do and she was looking forward to preparing the house for an army that was coming over later.  I avoid that stress now by adjusting my mind to a work first attitude, so we seldom have a stupid little argument that ruins a Holiday anymore.

…#2 Learn to smile and remove the stinking flies from the sweet perfume of life.

None of us will successfully control all the little problems that detract from the big moments of our lives.  One way to beat problems is to courageously fish out the dead flies from a sweet surprise that was supposed to be so perfect. If you really want to have value in life, become known as a person who cheerfully cleans up stinking messes.  Friend, if you are someone whose response to stinking disappointments is to make a bigger stink with your name calling, yelling and pouting, then you have problems bigger and smellier than a “fly in the ointment.”

One way to be thankful and create a world of gratitude around you is to be one who graciously and diligently deals with rotten issues.

By the way, sometimes God deals with our stinking problem by showing us mercy.   Unknown to us, my sister-in-law Barbara was also preparing a turkey at the same time ours was getting cold.   Hey, there’s another reason to be a tithe paying, God fearing Christian. Sometimes, God puts up the screen door when we fail too.