All
right people, get your round of applause ready. Why? Because the other day this
extremely clumsy, accident prone girl went in-line skating with all my youth
kids and I DIDN'T FALL ONCE. I know right?! It was a miracle in and of itself.
Actually, none of our kids ate it too bad. There was one casualty, however. We
shall call her Susie. Now, Susie is one of my soon to be freshman girls. And
she had never been skating before. Leaving her to be entirely vulnerable to the
Claw Machine. You know exactly the one I'm talking about don't you? The one
that sucks your dollars into its evil machine and you never get that stuffed
animal. Or, if you do, you find you've paid twenty bucks for a purple puppy you
could have gotten at Dollar Tree. Kiddy slot machines is what they are.
Well,
that is where this story begins. Towards the end of the general session my
ankle was rapidly reaching that "Hey you idiot, remember me? Yeah I'm
injured and permanently weak and now I'm going to remind you of that"
stage so I stopped to take a break. And that is when I spotted Susie. A look of
desperation crossed her face as she inserted dollar after dollar just hoping
that the claw would rotate enough to snag the elephant. I was torn. Part of me
wanted to encourage her to see it through and didn't want to tell her to just
cut her losses and give up, but the broke college student side was going
"That's almost half my weekly grocery bill." Finally Susie did
overcome the machine and ended up with a lime green cow, which she preceded to show
around for about ten more minutes, and then got bored with it saying she would
give it to her sister.
Two
thoughts come to my mind when I think about all this. 1) That scene from
Disney's Toy Story where the little green aliens say "Claw's our master.
Claw chooses who goes and who stays." and 2) How many times do we do that
with sin in our lives? We know the end result. We know its never going to
satisfy any sort of long term, but yet how many of us find ourselves making it
the masters of our own lives? How many of us keep pouring in tons of time,
energy, and money into something thats essentially cheap junk? We stand there
futilely and say, "It will be worth it. It will get better. It will make
me happy." Because sometimes the prizes do look good. But they never are.
And we realize it all too late. And once we do, we say we'll never do it again,
but ten minutes later, we end up right back at the machine, thumb on red
button, ready to go again. It reminds me of Hosea 2:7, "She will
chase after her lovers but not catch them; she will look for them but not find
them. Then she will say, 'I will go back to my husband as at first, for then I
was better off than now.'" Oh how much would our faith grow if we
were as desperate for God as we were to sin.
Susie
had this same experience. And I think it speaks wonders to accountability
partners because just as Susie was starting to insert yet another dollar, a
friend came up and stopped her. This friend told Susie her dollar would be
better spent getting a gatorade from the snackbar. Something that would nourish
and replenish her.
How
awesome is it that we can have these friends in our lives who help get us back
on the right track and make sure we stay there? And how awesome is it that we
have the Holy Spirit living inside us which is constantly reminding us to spend
our time getting replenished and seeking nourishment?
I
knew Susie would learn her lesson about her rookie mistake of falling prey to
those machines, but what I never could have guessed was the lesson her leader would
obtain from watching her.
"For
if, after they have escaped the defilements of the world through the knowledge
of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and
overcome, the last state has become worse for them than the first. For it would
have been better for them never to have known the way of righteousness than
after knowing it to turn back from the holy commandment delivered to them. What
the true proverb says has happened to them: “The dog returns to its own vomit,
and the sow, after washing herself, returns to wallow in the mire.” -2 Peter 2:
20-22
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