My Bad -- FPC sermon excerpt
One afternoon a carpet layer had just finished installing carpet for a woman. He stepped out for a smoke, only to realize that he had lost his cigarettes. After a quick but fruitless search, he noticed that in the middle of the room, under the carpet that he had just installed, was a bump. His cigarettes!
“No sense pulling up the entire floor for one pack of smokes,” the carpet layer said to himself. So, he got out his mallet and flattened the bump.
Not long after, as he was cleaning up, the woman came in. “Here,” she said, handing him his pack of cigarettes. “I found them in the hallway. Now,” she said, “if only I could find my parakeet.”
Oops.
My bad.
Animal lovers — I want to assure you: No animals were harmed in the making of this message.
Sometimes we know when we’ve made a mistake. Sometimes we don’t. It’s the ones we don’t see that can really bite us. In the magazine mental_floss (March-April 2007) is a list of the 20 greatest mistakes in history. They include:
The mistake that burned down London. On the night of September 1, 1666, the oven of the royal baker to the king of England sparked a fire. It was not a spectacular fire, and it seemed like no big deal at first, but it burned for five days. In the end, it wiped out 13,000 homes and leveled 80 percent of the city.
The mistake that sobered America up. Prohibition in the United States lasted from 1920 to 1933, and during this period it was illegal to manufacture, transport, and sell alcoholic beverages. It seemed like a great idea at the time — outlaw liquor, and you eliminate a number of alcohol-related social ills. But Americans like to have a drink or two, and Prohibition opened our eyes to the ways in which organized crime will meet this demand in violent and destructive ways.
The mistake that killed John Wayne. Much of the filming for the movie “The Conqueror” was done in Utah’s Snow Canyon, which is located about 150 miles downwind from a nuclear testing facility. At least 91 of the 220 people who worked on the movie contracted cancer, and more then half of them died — including John Wayne.
A spark jumps out of an oven, and a baker fails to snuff it. A well-intentioned ban is placed on alcohol. A movie is filmed downwind from a nuke facility. These are small oversights, errors, and miscalculations that we do not tend to see as major mistakes.
But secret problems can hurt us. They can quickly get out of control and kill us. They should drive us to our knees, cause us to do some searching self-examination, and lead us to confess what the Bible calls our “hidden faults” (Psalm 19:12).
In other words, they should cause us to admit to God, “My bad.”
“No sense pulling up the entire floor for one pack of smokes,” the carpet layer said to himself. So, he got out his mallet and flattened the bump.
Not long after, as he was cleaning up, the woman came in. “Here,” she said, handing him his pack of cigarettes. “I found them in the hallway. Now,” she said, “if only I could find my parakeet.”
Oops.
My bad.
Animal lovers — I want to assure you: No animals were harmed in the making of this message.
Sometimes we know when we’ve made a mistake. Sometimes we don’t. It’s the ones we don’t see that can really bite us. In the magazine mental_floss (March-April 2007) is a list of the 20 greatest mistakes in history. They include:
The mistake that burned down London. On the night of September 1, 1666, the oven of the royal baker to the king of England sparked a fire. It was not a spectacular fire, and it seemed like no big deal at first, but it burned for five days. In the end, it wiped out 13,000 homes and leveled 80 percent of the city.
The mistake that sobered America up. Prohibition in the United States lasted from 1920 to 1933, and during this period it was illegal to manufacture, transport, and sell alcoholic beverages. It seemed like a great idea at the time — outlaw liquor, and you eliminate a number of alcohol-related social ills. But Americans like to have a drink or two, and Prohibition opened our eyes to the ways in which organized crime will meet this demand in violent and destructive ways.
The mistake that killed John Wayne. Much of the filming for the movie “The Conqueror” was done in Utah’s Snow Canyon, which is located about 150 miles downwind from a nuclear testing facility. At least 91 of the 220 people who worked on the movie contracted cancer, and more then half of them died — including John Wayne.
A spark jumps out of an oven, and a baker fails to snuff it. A well-intentioned ban is placed on alcohol. A movie is filmed downwind from a nuke facility. These are small oversights, errors, and miscalculations that we do not tend to see as major mistakes.
But secret problems can hurt us. They can quickly get out of control and kill us. They should drive us to our knees, cause us to do some searching self-examination, and lead us to confess what the Bible calls our “hidden faults” (Psalm 19:12).
In other words, they should cause us to admit to God, “My bad.”
posted by Henry Brinton | 6:35 PM
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