When Samuel was in grade school, he used to collect Pokémon cards. Fairly inexpensive thing to do—which was a good thing because I was studying full-time and teaching classes at U of L for Teaching Assistant pay.

Not having a lot of money, one of the ways we'd incentivize good behavior—to make up for the fact that we didn't have much money—was to say, "If you and your sister don't fight, and if you do your chores, we'll take you to Walmart on the weekend to buy more Pokemon cards."

Though an obvious bow to late-stage capitalism, it was a pretty effective incentive program—it worked, and it was cheap.

But one weekend, Susan had to work, and I was working on an article, which was going to loom large in landing a job as a tenure-track professor—so I was extra consumed with it.

Anyway, Samuel came to me and asked when we were going to go to Walmart to get some Pokémon cards. At that time, we didn't have a Walmart close by. We had to drive all the way out to Westport Road and the Gene Snyder to get to the closest one—and, like I said, I was busy. So, I told him, "Hey buddy, I apologize, but I'm swamped. I'm not going to be able to take you this weekend. I'm sorry."

I knew he wouldn’t like my answer, but I didn't know how much he wouldn't like my answer. In his defense, I'd told him earlier in the week that we'd head out to Walmart over the weekend to get Pokémon cards. So, his displeasure was surely understandable. But it was the intensity of it that I was unprepared for.

He was ticked, stomping around, decrying the sad state of the world and how utterly unfair life is. And I'd promised. And he'd been looking forward to this all week. You know this goes.

I said, "I know, sweetie. I'm sorry to disappoint you, but I'm super busy and have to finish this. I'll take you next week."— I almost said, "I promise," but realized that that wouldn’t help.

It was then he said something that sticks with me to this day. If you've raised young children, you've almost certainly heard it yourself. He stomped up to his bedroom, all the while protesting to the heavens: "This is the worst day ever!"

I took a breath and collected myself. And, guilty as I felt, I wanted to say, "Sweetie, this is definitely not the worst day ever. And if I'm wrong, and this does turn out to be the worst day you ever have in your whole life, I will die happy."

As a forty-something-year-old at the time, I had a pretty good idea that he'd have much worse days than that and that if he only knew what he might have to endure as a human being on this planet, he would never say that not getting Pokémon cards one weekend was the cause of the worst day ever.

But given his experience of the world to that point, there's no way he could have understood it. As an adult, I had the advantage of having lived through many far worse days. I knew, for example, that the League Championship Series in 2003 when Steve Bartman interfered with a foul ball in the eighth inning, which led to a string of blunders that caused the Cubs to miss out on going to the World Series for the first time since World War II was a pretty awful day in the history of the world. I knew that having one of our living room chairs blow off the back of the pickup truck in downtown Detroit on I-75 during rush hour as Susan and I were moving to Tennessee was a bad day—or when the basement flooded and ruined boxes of my books. All really bad days and that doesn't even take into account days that have dealt with life and death—like the day my family decided that I was the only one who could tell my dad that it was time for us to call in Hospice.

But for Samuel to understand his fourth-grade disappointment as a disappointment and not a world tragedy, he would have needed a perspective he could not possess at the time. Such a perspective only comes with the wisdom developed with experience.

Perspective makes all the difference, doesn't it?

The world looks one way, but then you wake up and find that it's not; it's something different entirely.

After the election of 2016, one of my favorite podcasters, Merlin Mann, summed up my feelings perfectly. He said: "When I woke up on November 9th after the cosmic gut punch from the night before, it wasn't just that I felt like we'd lost the baseball game. I felt like I no longer understood baseball."

Perspective. You look at a picture, and you very clearly see a duck. But after a bit, somebody says, "That's not a duck; it's a rabbit." And now you can't unsee it.

The picture doesn't change, just your point of view.

I'm going to suggest to you that, once again, the traditional interpretation of this passage in our Gospel this morning is a matter of perspective.

Reading through the history of interpretation of this, we find two schools. One school views this parable through the lens of "end times." After what appears at first glance to be faithful service, the first two servants are ushered into the "joy of their master"—like those who are faithful on judgment day will be ushered into heaven.