Bad Tradition

I started a little tradition a few years ago. We were in a department store. Lois and the girls were looking at makeup and stuff. We were trying to avoid the young women in the white coats intent on spraying us with things when an idea came to my mind that I should have resisted. I picked up a lovely sample of women’s cologne in a spay bottle and when Chuk turned away I gave him a generous shot of it in the back of the neck. I thought he smelled real pretty.

He was a little narrow-minded about it. He only thinks things like that are funny when he comes up with them first himself. A few months later the boys began to do it to each other. Since then none of us have really been safe.

Last spring I was preaching a series of meetings for a fellowship of churches in Illinois. Dan and Wes came along and we spent the week boarding with a widow from one of the churches. In the apartment where we were staying the good lady had left a bottle of strong perfume on a dresser. It had probably been there awhile. It was vintage stuff. Wes and Dan were getting ready for church and Dan thought Wes could use a little frgrance, so when he turned his back he gave him both barrells.

Wes let out a loud, gutteral, angry scream. In all my life I know I will never encounter such a fragrance. It was the horseradish of cologne. Three days later you could still smell it on him. At church that night people looked at us kinda’ funny.

The other day the boys crossed the line and took advantage of me when my back was turned. I heard a comotion behind me and turned around. Wes was smiling at me and said, “I got ya’.” He had doused the back of my wool coat with a floral odor that is going to be very hard to explain to my wife.

Sometimes its best just not to get things started. Once things get out of hand there’s no going back. Take it from me. Over the years I have come to wish I’d had never fired the first shot in the perfume war. It’s like sin. It best not to get the thing started in the first place.

Sin is no joke. We should never take it lightly. It has a way of getting out of hand fast. Before you know what has happened things are out of control. And, like the old preacher once said; “Son whatever you don’t control will quickly control you.” At first sin is a trifle to us, a harmless indulgence, before we know it we have been ” – caught in a trap and taken captive by the devil to do his will.” (2 Timothy 2:26).

We should always take sin seriously, especially secret sin. It has a way of spreading like cancer and making any kind of life impossible.

Ken Pierpont
Riverfront Character Inn
Flint, Michigan
February 20, 2006