When some attorneys pointed out to Seattle residences that a fee on their water bill for servicing hydrants should be taken from the general tax fund and not placed on their water bill, the residents banned together to sue the city. The Washington Supreme Court agreed and ordered customer refunds averaging $45. However, Seattle then discovered it had insufficient general funds to pay for hydrant service and thus imposed a water surcharge of $59 per customer. The most likely reason the surcharge was higher is that the city had to pay $4.2 million to the attorneys who filed the account-shuffling lawsuit. In the end it all comes back to you anyway. I feel bad for Seattleites but I understand why this happens. We are all tempted to take the easy road and find a shortcut but often this path ends up putting us in more peril. This is very true in spiritual things. We can not sow without reaping. Wide paths and cheap grace may sound good but lead to destruction. Godly people need patience to stay on the strait and narrow and avoid pitfalls that the easy road contains.
Let’s say you travel back in time six hundred years or so. Luckily, you happen across a fellow that speaks English. Upon hearing your tale, he describes you as nice, smart, and handsome. Wouldn’t you feel good? You shouldn’t. As Sol Steinmetz in his book, Semantics Antics , explains; Nice originally meant someone who was foolish, ignorant, senseless, or absurd (middle English 1300). Smart for the first 300 years of its use meant causing pain, sharp, cutting, or severe, a sense that survives in the idiom "smart as a whip.” Handsome wasn’t complimentary. When coined around 1425, it just meant easily handled; it didn’t have its current positive connotation until 1590. You might think he said you were a kind, intelligent, good looking bloke, when in reality he said you were a foolish pain easily dealt with. Words have an annoying habit of changing meaning over time in the same language and it becomes even more compli...
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