Wednesday,
January 4, 2023
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
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
Images: Title Pixabay.com Images without citation are either personal
property of the author, or in public domain.
Unless noted, Scripture quoted
from The New Living Translation©
