When I was a child of six my mother told me about bees. “Bees are good. They make honey. They pollinate flowers and trees, which helps make flowers more beautiful and trees more fruitful. But bees have stingers that can hurt you. Leave them alone. If you leave them alone and mind your own business, they’ll mind theirs.”
That sounded like good wisdom. I liked honey and fruit. Flowers were pretty and I had no desire to get stung. It sounded like getting stung might hurt.
At the front of our home was a collection of bushes my seven-year old brother and I simply called “the bee bushes.” They had tiny, light pink, bell shaped flowers that attracted bees. One day, shortly after my mother’s sage advice, my brother showed me a trick. When a bee stuck its little head into a bee bush flower, he squeezed the flower, crushing the bee’s head. Out it dropped—dead. He looked at me triumphantly and un-stung.
“Now you do it.”
“I’ll get stung.”
“Not if you do it right.”
“I won’t do it.”
“You’re chicken.”
That was too much to take from my older brother. Timidly, I attempted the same maneuver on another bee. Success! The bee dropped to the grass below—dead. My brother was right. My mother was wrong. I killed several more bees that day. In the next couple of weeks, I probably killed a dozen more—and never got stung.
One Saturday morning I was out in front of our house again—alone and bored. I decided to do the flower squeeze to amuse myself and went into action.
“Ouch!” I suddenly yelled. With my left thumb and index finger I pulled the stinger from my right thumb. Guess what I never did again?
Three lessons from the story:
- It actually pays to listen to our parents once in a while.
Honor your father and mother (which is the first commandment with a promise), that it may be well with you, and that you may live long on the earth. Ephesians 6:2-3
- Sin is both destructive and addictive. We may fancy ourselves clever enough to sin and escape its consequences, but addiction kicks in and inevitably our folly will catch up with us
- Enough trouble will come to each of us in life all on its own. It is unnecessary to look for more.
