Growing up my brother and I would at times do things we shouldn't. Well, maybe more often than sometime! This however was one of those incidents that bordered on being mean and cruel. However, out of our innocence of being elementary school boys it at the time was just a simple experiment.
When we lived on 21st street in Plano we knew pretty much all the neighbors on our street and those across the alley as well. One family with whom we went to Sunday services came over frequently for a cookout. It was at one of those cookouts that I was in the room when a certain conversation took place.
It seemed that their daughter who was my age was highly afraid of feathers. An incident had occurred when she was young where here grandmother had rung the neck of a chicken for dinner and the dead fowl had flopped around and onto her sending her into a panic. From that moment on she was terrified of feathers.
Well, I told my brother and we could not understand how anyone could be so scared of feathers. It just didn't seem logical to an 8 year old. Soooooooooo, we decided to put it to a scientific experiment. My mother had two long peacock feathers in her closet. The plan was that my brother then 6 when get her into my mother's bedroom and I'd tickle her with the feathers. It went just as planned, my brother lured her in and I took the feathers and lightly touched her face.
Guess what! She was deathly afraid of feathers and ran from the room in terror and tears. Our company went home and my brother and I received our just reward for our actions. There was no room for explanations. In addition we had to make a trip to the neighbors and give a personal apology for our actions. Fortunately, the incident did not hinder the continued friendship of the two families and the kids involved.
There are times in our life that we do things we know we're not suppose to do. So why do we do them anyway? Are we just stupid? Maybe. Do we not care? Sometimes perhaps. But Paul gives us the best answer as he wrote in Romans 7, "I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do - this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it. So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God's law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members.What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?"
Life is a struggle where we have both good and evil tugging at us. It's kind of like the old cartoons where we have an angel on one shoulder and and a devil on the other. What we have to decide is which one we are going to listen to. In the end we can only win the war by listening and acting on what God tells us and not what the world wants us to do.
When we lived on 21st street in Plano we knew pretty much all the neighbors on our street and those across the alley as well. One family with whom we went to Sunday services came over frequently for a cookout. It was at one of those cookouts that I was in the room when a certain conversation took place.
It seemed that their daughter who was my age was highly afraid of feathers. An incident had occurred when she was young where here grandmother had rung the neck of a chicken for dinner and the dead fowl had flopped around and onto her sending her into a panic. From that moment on she was terrified of feathers.
Well, I told my brother and we could not understand how anyone could be so scared of feathers. It just didn't seem logical to an 8 year old. Soooooooooo, we decided to put it to a scientific experiment. My mother had two long peacock feathers in her closet. The plan was that my brother then 6 when get her into my mother's bedroom and I'd tickle her with the feathers. It went just as planned, my brother lured her in and I took the feathers and lightly touched her face.
Guess what! She was deathly afraid of feathers and ran from the room in terror and tears. Our company went home and my brother and I received our just reward for our actions. There was no room for explanations. In addition we had to make a trip to the neighbors and give a personal apology for our actions. Fortunately, the incident did not hinder the continued friendship of the two families and the kids involved.
There are times in our life that we do things we know we're not suppose to do. So why do we do them anyway? Are we just stupid? Maybe. Do we not care? Sometimes perhaps. But Paul gives us the best answer as he wrote in Romans 7, "I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do - this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it. So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God's law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members.What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?"
Life is a struggle where we have both good and evil tugging at us. It's kind of like the old cartoons where we have an angel on one shoulder and and a devil on the other. What we have to decide is which one we are going to listen to. In the end we can only win the war by listening and acting on what God tells us and not what the world wants us to do.
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