For The Birds

  It’s one of those traditions we have seen for years, a bride and groom leaving their wedding in a shower of rice. Only we don’t do that anymore.  It's bubbles or confetti or a host of other things but not rice. Why not? 

  So birds won’t explode.

  The story goes that baby birds eat the rice, it swells up in their stomach and those poor avian are left to die a horrible death.  It’s everywhere. Ann Landers wrote a column about, it been on TV shows and state legislatures have passed laws banning rice at weddings

  Only that story isn’t true. Ornithologist having been saying so for years, rice doesn’t kill birds. Rice doesn’t swell up any more than anything else birds eat. Birds consume wild rice all the time and suffer no grotesque effects. 

  So why does everyone think it does.

  I’d like to think some church janitor came up with the rumor after having to sweep up the mess one too many times, but we don’t know where it started only that it spread like wildfire.   It is strange how ‘common knowledge’ can take hold even when there isn’t a shred of truth to it.

  We need to be careful about what we believe. It can be amazing how people have beliefs that they have never examined to see if they are so. Not knowing about rice and birds may not much matter, but how one is saved, the way God commands us to worship, the behaviors that can cause to miss the kingdom of heaven, most certainly do! Shouldn’t we know what we believe and what makes it so?

Now these were more noble-minded than those in Thessalonica, for they received the word with great eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see whether these things were so.

Acts 17:11 

  Are our beliefs established by fact or fiction? Do we know a thing is so or are we just accepting it without much consideration? Do we cite sources that are not in the know or have we looked to the source of all truth? Are we acting in truth or trusting in a lie?