File it under "Dumb Criminals"

Hey y'all:

I wanted to share a story that happened right here in central Virginia. You can find the whole news item in the News and Advance online here:

More Charges in Christmas Barrage

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The story is that a certain fellow who lives near Liberty University received a birthday gift of "homemade liquor and 5,000 rounds of ammunition" for Christmas. After drinking a few rounds of his homemade brew, he decided it would be fun to shoot up the neighborhood ("Drinking and Shooting don't mix" and "Don't Shoot Drunk." Ads for Moms against Drunk Shooting--MADS). At any rate, his neighborhood included the above mentioned school and the River Ridge Mall.

Neighbors called the police who tried to contact the fellow by phone. He wouldn't answer the phone. In fact, he came out of his mobile home onto his porch and fired his gun into the air as the officers watched!

Unfortunately for him, his homemade liquor dulled his senses.

Evidently when he came out onto the porch to shoot his gun into the air, he inadvertently locked himself out of the house!

Can you say "Nowhere to hide?"

Needless to say, the police took the drunk shootist into custody and charged him with several felonies.

I guess the reason he locked himself out of the house was because he left his keys with his designated driver. Who knows?

I tell this story as evidence of how dumb humans (all of us!) can be.

Most of us reading this story chuckled at the man's ineptitude, but we aren't much different.

We persist in our own sins and selfishness, brandishing our self made guns at our Creator while drunk on the homemade liquor of our own arrogance.

We think we can outwit God just by avoiding answering the phone when he calls.

We think we can be "responsible" with our sin, that is, do it only so much so that "it doesn't really hurt anybody."

In reality, our selfishness has made us drunk. Our sin has made us stupid!

We can't see the damage we do when we choose to go our own way, drink our own brew, shoot our own guns without any thought of others around us.

Professing ourselves to be wise, we become fools.

Jesus reminds us that if we really want to have an impact on the world (besides being drunk with our own sin and shooting everyone in sight with our own self-righteousness, that is) then we really should learn to serve others. That's right, we should seek to make the least among us (the least glamorous, the least successful, etc.) the most important. We should take the servant's towel and wrap it around our waists, we should wash the stinky, dirty feet of the person we would normally not even notice. We should serve others instead of drinking ourselves into oblivion on our own importance.

We need to be like Jesus--willing to die for those who really don't deserve it.

I don't want to be drunk on my own selfish ideas.

I want to sober up with service. I want to learn to love my neighbor properly.

Thanks for reading!