Skip to main content

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?

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Until Midnight

    In Acts 20, there is the tragicomic event surrounding a young man by the name of Eutychus. He did what a lot of folks before and after him did, he fell asleep during a sermon. Unfortunately, he was setting in in the third story window at the time. So instead of nodding off and hitting the pew in front of him, he fell to his death. The good news was the apostle Paul was delivering the sermon and had the ability to bring him back.       I don’t know, however, if we can judge Eutychus too harshly. The sermon had gone on till midnight. Paul wouldn’t finish it up till daybreak. That’s a long lesson. I know some folks that might want to jump out of a window if I had a lesson that long, yet these Christians wanted to be there to hear Paul.   Don’t get me wrong, I’m not pushing for all night sermons but I think we might need to adopt these folks' dedication. They knew that Paul was only in town for a limited time only and they were determined to ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Gift You Give Yourself

    I always hated buying gifts for my Mom. If I got her something like a new set of pans, it was like saying “Here’s something you can use to go make me something to eat”. A gift for her was seemingly a gift for me.   There are however gifts you give that benefit you more than the receiver. For example, forgiveness. When you give it, you are giving it to yourself as much as you are giving it to them. Jesus said that when we forgive others it means God is forgiving us our wrongs (Matthew 6:14-15).  I once read: “ Heaven is where everyone's forgiven. Hell is where nobody's forgiven.  So, when we forgive we pull heaven down into our lives.  When we withhold forgiveness, we pull hell up into our lives ” Give yourself something nice today, Forgive.
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Does A Lion Tamer Use a Chair?

  Ok, I know you have seen the image. A lion tamer enters in the cage of the beast and forces it to obey his commands using a whip, a gun and a chair. Now you can see how the whip and gun could come in handy but you might be wondering why a chair would intimidate an animal as powerful as a lion? Clyde Beatty taming a lion with a chair   It's not that the lion is afraid of the chair -- it's that the lion is confused by the chair. Cats are single-minded, and the points of the chair's four legs bobbing around confuse the lion enough that it loses its train of thought. Casually put, the chair distracts the lion from wanting to claw the lion tamer's face off. The powerful creature could destroy the chair in moment’s notice but instead it is distracted into submission.  It’s not too much different than how Satan controls us today. By the power of God we could overcome anything that he would use to subdue us. We can overcome the evil one (1 st John 2:13-14). ...
Post a Comment
Read more