Choices Determine Consequences

The Latest Word from John Ed Mathison

Bad choices lead to bad consequences.  Oftentimes we think that we can do something wrong and it will be alright.  It is not.  Every choice has a consequence.

Brad Lynn Hemby ws an Alabama burglary suspect.  When he tried to get away from police he crashed his truck. He ran into a cow pasture guarded by a territorial bull.  He quickly got the attention of the resident bull.  Sheriff Scott Walls said, “The bull gave chase, along with his deputies.”  As you might imagine, Hemby panicked when he got tangled up in a barbed-wire fence.  He felt safer with the police than the bull.  Every choice has a consequence.

This summer there was a 46-year-old Italian man scheduled to fly from Turin to Rome.  He was running late for his flight so he phoned in a bomb threat.  The plane delayed its takeoff and returned to the terminal to be searched.

The man arrived at the airport and said that he wanted to get on the plane.  Upon questioning him, they discovered he was the one who had phoned in the bomb threat.  He was arrested.  He won’t be making any flights in the near future as he will be serving a lengthy prison sentence.  Choices always have consequences.

One of the new technological gadgets is the Fitbit.  It records a lot of data that can be helpful to you.  It can also reveal some things you don’t want revealed.

A woman in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, filed a police report saying that an intruder had sexually assaulted her in bed at midnight.  The assault scene had a lot of overturned furniture and a bottle of vodka.  The woman also had a Fitbit.  When the police downloaded the information, they discovered that the woman was awake and walking around at the time she told police she had been sleeping.  The Fitbit contradicted her whole account of the attempted rape.  The woman now faces three misdemeanor counts for prompting an emergency response and manhunt.  Choices bring consequences.

Serena Williams, the Woman Athlete of the Year, was in a restaurant in San Francisco.  A thief snatched  her cell phone and started running.  Serena was faster and ran him down.  She caught the man and asked in the “most menacing yet calm no-nonsense voice” whether he had “accidentally” taken the wrong phone.  The man was caught.  He quickly said, “Gosh, you know what – I did!”  Serena got a standing ovation from the other patrons in the restaurant.  The man’s bad choice had a bad consequence.

A high school football team in Canon City, Colorado circulated 300 to 400 nude photographs of more than 100 different kids.  They used a special cell phone “vault app.”  The app is made to look like a calculator, but reveals hidden photos after a password is entered.  Some of the pictures involved kids in the eighth grade.  They then learned that a significant part of the student body participated.  Bad choices by the football team – and bad consequences.

The Bible says that what we plant we will also reap (Galatians 6:7).  You can’t plant weeds and expect to harvest corn.  You can’t sow wild oats during the week and then come to Church on Sunday and pray for a crop failure. (Tweet this) The consequence is determined by the choice.

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