If my feeble memory and limited Internet research are accurate, it was a Carefree chewing gum commercial from the 1970s that I am remembering  every time I intone, “Oh Abner, don’t take the world serious!” The commercial jokingly suggested that Mrs. Doubleday had inadvertently given her husband the name for baseball’s annual championship round, but clearly the episode is apocryphal. I have always liked the message nonetheless – don’t take the world serious, at least not as seriously as we sometimes do. As another baseball season gives way to the hot stove league, we have time to huddle in our homes and contemplate the passage of time and the things that really matter, baseball being one of them only by the slimmest of margins. No, what we see more clearly is that many of the world’s things which we take too seriously simply expire with use or fail to affect our eternities unless we inflate their importance so much that they take priority over matters of faith, become idols of the heart, or threaten us through temptation. The things of this world are just not as serious as matters having to do with the next. Mrs. Doubleday was right after all.