Of Mules and Murphy's Law

Wednesday, January 4, 2023

The Lord observed the extent of human wickedness on the earth, and he saw that everything they thought or imagined was consistently and totally evil. Genesis 6:5

If you’re familiar with the adage known as Murphy’s Law and the epigram about leopards not changing their spots, you also will have little trouble understanding how God felt about humans back in Noah’s day.

Murphy’s Law simply states:  Anything that can go wrong…will go wrong.  Add the leopard epigrammatic twist, and it becomes:

Anything that can go wrong…will go wrong, again, and again, and again!

I have seen it firsthand!  About 30 years ago our church in Jacksonville, Florida, did an outdoor Christmas extravaganza, complete with stations around the buildings, representing Jerusalem and Bethlehem.  The pathway from the gates of the city (North Main Street in Jacksonville as Main Street Jerusalem), with tax collectors, Roman soldiers, Pharisees, women at the well, etc…eventually brought each visitor around to the back parking lot and the manger.  We had all the cast, Mary, Joseph, a two-month-old baby Jesus, plenty of sheep, a milk cow, and one very strong-willed mule.  The mule’s owner had a six-year-old son, in charge of keeping the animal off to one side of the manger while the preacher greeted the visiting public, and shared the story of Jesus’ birth.  That was the plan!  However, plans have a rather obnoxious habit of colliding with Murphy’s Law.  And, in this case, we became the story worthy of Clark Griswold’s Christmas Vacation.

The first couple of groups that came to the manger were textbook successes.  Then the mule started getting bored or anxious, wanting to take over my presentation of the Gospel.  It was hard for the crowd to hear the preacher for the braying.  (A member with a questionable sense of humor later told me it was hard to tell the difference between my preaching and the mule’s anyway).  The next time a group came through I cautioned the young boy holding the harness lead to keep the beast quiet.  About half-way through my presentation, the mule decided he’d had enough.  He strolled right between me and the crowd, dragging a six-year-old, holding onto the harness reigns, yelling at the top of his lungs:  stop it, stop it, you fool mule.  It was loud enough to be heard in South Georgia.  The worst part was the mule looking back and staring at me, face-to-face like Balaam’s donkey[1], with that look that said:  You were never in charge anyway, preacher. 

If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result, Murphy’s correlation of that would be:  If you think you’re in control, you will spend major portions of your life in therapy.

The people of Noah’s day thought they were in control…but that was before the barometer dropped, and the thunder clouds gathered. 

For You Today  

Not every plan you make will result in as much disaster as that one night in North Florida’s manger scene.  But even when it does, it may be appropriate.  There may have been some people there who just needed a good laugh, and a lighter load during a tough time.  It’s hard to figure-out why God put mules on the earth, until the moment they steal the show.

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!

Go to VIDEO (read by author)

There are about 2,000 devotional posts and 400 sermons in the Rocky Road Devotions library.  To dig deeper on today’s topic, explore some of these: 

Fear Factor - Part 1  and  When It Hurts So Much

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Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation^©  

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[1] Balaam and his Donkey Numbers 22