We walked along our country road on a long-ago fall day.  My husband Paul and I  chatted and five-year-old Peter scuffled along in the leaves behind us.  Out of the corner of my eye I saw that he was twirling something.

“What is that – a rope?” I asked.

He stopped twirling it and held it up for me to see.  It was a snake.

“Drop it,” I screamed.   He did, and the snake fell lifeless to the ground.

“It’s just an old dead snake,” he said.  “I was going to put it in my dead collection.”

Dead collection?!  Come to think of it, there had been a peculiar odor in his room lately…. I will draw the curtain on the next scene and will not describe the events that took place when we returned home.  What would possess a kid to collect smelly old dead things?

The Lord has been dealing with me lately about my personal dead collection – the one I keep in my heart.  There’s a slimy old snake of self-pity, and the flat frog of false pride.  Then there’s the big box of dead bugs. They are ugly, bitter memories of hurts and offenses.  Every now and then I take out the box and look them over.

There’s the dead wasp memory of the time my best friend stabbed me in the back.  I look at it and remember how much that sting hurt me.

There’s the memory of when my husband let me down.  (That one looks kind of like a roach.)

I examine again the dead beetle memory of the day I was really down and a Christian brother came and gave me a good swift kick.

What would possess a Christian to collect smelly old dead things?

When we pray the model prayer we say, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.”  Do we really mean that?  Do want God to keep a collection of our past sins and failures? Would we want him to take them out and look them over now and then?

Forgiveness is not a suggestion.  It’s a command.  My collection of hurt feelings and bitter thoughts aren’t any more pleasing to Him that the stuff I found under Peter’s bed was to me.

What’s the point of keeping those thoughts?  Does it benefit anyone to keep hashing over those things?  There’s only one good use I can think of for a collection of dead bugs.  We had to make one in seventh grade science so that we could learn about insects.  The more I learned about them, the less I liked them.

Take a good look at that bitter memory.  God allowed that thing to happen to you.  Why? What did you learn from it?  How did that incident shape your life for good – or how could it have shaped you if you had cooperated with God about it? After you’ve learned all you can from that bitter memory, thank God for allowing it to happen to you. Then toss it out.  You don’t need it anymore.

Dead collections aren’t for Christians.

Eating to live and living for Christ,

Susan Jordan Brown