Little Itty Bitty Baby Piranha
Posted Thu, 02/17/2011 - 1:00am by Dr. Carolyn Tennant
Read Romans 6:11-23.
Exhausted and frazzled at the end of a long workday, I dropped into my car and flipped on the radio. A little human interest story was being broadcast, and my distracted mind picked it up immediately.
A local pet store had received an order of fish. The problem was that the shipment had arrived a day early and only about ten minutes before closing. The two employees knew that the fish needed to be unpacked and placed into aquariums immediately. Unfortunately, there were no aquariums ready. Water temperature needed to be just right and that couldn't happen in mere minutes.
The solution: place them into tanks already in use. They'd sort it all out in the morning, they said to themselves.
However, what were they to do with a pair of baby piranha which had come as part of the shipment? They saved them until the end and still had no solution. Technically, the piranha needed to be in their own tank since they munched other fish. But now it was already fifteen minutes past closing, and there were no empty tanks.
The employees studied the piranha carefully, decided they were so small that they were probably harmless, and dumped them into an occupied tank just for the night.
The next morning when the employees arrived at the store, they could only stare in horror. Those two little bitty piranha now had their own tank. They had eaten every single one of the other fish.
I was on the freeway by now and chuckled to myself. What a story! Then I sobered as a thought struck me forcibly.
What about the little bitty baby piranha in my own life? How often had I acted exactly the same way, reasoning that a small sin could stay in my life "just overnight"? How many times had I been too tired or too stressed to deal with a bad attitude or a wrong motive? In essence, I had just left it in my life until later.
Sin always brings death. Even what people consider "small sins" will eat up what's good in our lives.
I determined that day not to leave any little piranha in my life, not even overnight.
Now read 1 John 1: 5-10