We walked along our country road on a long-ago fall day.\u00a0 My husband Paul and I\u00a0 chatted and five-year-old Peter scuffled along in the leaves behind us.\u00a0 Out of the corner of my eye I saw that he was twirling something.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat is that \u2013 a rope?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n
He stopped twirling it and held it up for me to see. \u00a0It was a snake.<\/p>\n
\u201cDrop it,\u201d I screamed. \u00a0\u00a0He did, and the snake fell lifeless to the ground.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s just an old dead snake,\u201d he said.\u00a0 \u201cI was going to put it in my dead collection.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dead collection?! \u00a0Come to think of it, there had been a peculiar odor in his room lately….\u00a0I will draw the curtain on the next scene and will not describe the events that took place when we returned home. \u00a0What would possess a kid to collect smelly old dead things?<\/p>\n
The Lord has been dealing with me lately about my personal dead collection \u2013 the one I keep in my heart.\u00a0 There\u2019s a slimy old snake of self-pity, and the flat frog of false pride.\u00a0 Then there\u2019s the big box of dead bugs. They are ugly, bitter memories of hurts and offenses.\u00a0 Every now and then I take out the box and look them over.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s the dead wasp memory of the time my best friend stabbed me in the back.\u00a0 I look at it and remember how much that sting hurt me.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s the memory of when my husband let me down.\u00a0 (That one looks kind of like a roach.)<\/p>\n
I examine again the dead beetle memory of the day I was really down and a Christian brother came and gave me a good swift kick.<\/p>\n
What would possess a Christian to collect smelly old dead things?<\/p>\n
When we pray the model prayer we say, \u201cForgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.\u201d \u00a0Do we really mean that?\u00a0 Do want God to keep a collection of our past sins and failures? Would we want him to take them out and look them over now and then?<\/p>\n
Forgiveness is not a suggestion.\u00a0 It\u2019s a command.\u00a0 My collection of hurt feelings and bitter thoughts aren\u2019t any more pleasing to Him that the stuff I found under Peter\u2019s bed was to me.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s the point of keeping those thoughts?\u00a0 Does it benefit anyone to keep hashing over those things? \u00a0There\u2019s only one good use I can think of for a collection of dead bugs.\u00a0 We had to make one in seventh grade science so that we could learn about insects.\u00a0 The more I learned about them, the less I liked them.<\/p>\n
Take a good look at that bitter memory.\u00a0 God allowed that thing to happen to you.\u00a0 Why? What did you learn from it?\u00a0 How did that incident shape your life for good \u2013 or how could it have shaped you if you had cooperated with God about it? After you\u2019ve learned all you can from that bitter memory, thank God for allowing it to happen to you. Then toss it out.\u00a0 You don\u2019t need it anymore.<\/p>\n
Dead collections aren\u2019t for Christians.<\/p>\n
Eating to live and living for Christ,<\/em><\/p>\n Susan Jordan Brown<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We walked along our country road on a long-ago fall day.\u00a0 My husband Paul and I\u00a0 chatted and five-year-old Peter scuffled along in the leaves behind us.\u00a0 Out of the corner of my eye I saw that he was twirling something. \u201cWhat is that \u2013 a rope?\u201d I asked. He stopped twirling it and held…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":423,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[121],"class_list":["post-579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sunday-special-messages","tag-forgiveness"],"yoast_head":"\n