new

heard this the other week and thought of it and wanted to share it. i'll paraphrase of course.

lets say you're a chain smoker. you've been smoking since you were 16. you smoke a pack a day. lets say by about 27 you decided you would stop smoking because it's bad for you. by the age of 31 you have been diagnosed with some sort of lung disease or something. well crap. you don't like this. you were hoping on living a while longer. so your lungs are giving out because you smoked. they're dying, breaking, whatever; they aren't going to be able to help you breath pretty soon. so you're in the hospital now and they put you on a donor list for some lungs, and tell you that if you don't get new lungs you've got like 6 months to live or something. but lucky you, someone donates you a pair of lungs, and you get these new lungs and you are healthy.

question: are you going to go smoke again and ruin this new pair of lungs?
answer: no.

you're going to take care of them. well hey, we're all like that in a way. we've got this life and we totally mess it up. we lie, steal, cheat, are mean to people, don't respect our family, you name it. we are all doing terrible awful things that not only hurt us, but it hurts those around us at times as well. but there is this cool dude named jesus who is totally like "hey, i can give you new life and you can follow me and it will be awesome. i love you more than anyone else ever has. you should totally accept this gift i want to give you."

but so many times we take this gift of a new life and just start doing the same old things. (we get new lungs and start smoking again.) why would we ruin the new pair of lungs? we wouldn't. so why are we ruining the new life we get? we could be like "cool jesus. i love you too, and i don't really want to have this life where all i do is sin and hurt myself and others. maybe you could help me out and teach me how to be a better person." in fact, we should do that. if we wouldn't ruin lungs, shouldn't we value life a bit more and not ruin that either?

just something i was thinking about...