About eight of us gathered last night for our prayer meeting and Bible study. First we looked at Romans 7:7-12 and then after a bref chat we prayed. Everyone prayed. It was good to be there. I like this story I came across by the late James Montgomery Boice, giving an example of how law doesn't work because of what they call counter-suggestibility.
One spring, when I was in the sixth grade (11 or 12 y o), our school principal came into the classroom just before lunch. He'd heard that some of the students had been playing with fireworks and wanted to say that this was definitely not allowed. Fireworks are dangerous and were against Pennsylvania state law. If any student even brought a firework into school, even if it was not set off, he'd expel him. I didn't own any fireworks. I'd not even been thinking about fireworks. But, you know, once a person starts thinking about them, fireworks really are intriguing. As I thought about it, I remembered a friend had some. On the way home from school a friend and I went by this friend's house, picked up a firework and returned to school within 45 minutes of the principal's announcement. We went into the cloakroom, invited a friend to join us and said, “You hold the firecracker by the middle of the fuse. Pinch it very tight. Then we'll light it. The others will think that it's going to explode. But when it burns down to your fingers it'll go out, and everything will be all right.” What we hadn't counted on was that the fire would burn our friend's fingers. When we lit the fuse, it did. Our friend dropped the firework. It exploded in an immense cloud of blue smoke and tiny bits of white paper in the midst of which we emerged from the closet, shaken and a bit deaf. You can't imagine how loud a firework sounds in an old public school building. Nor can you imagine how quickly a principal can get out of his office, down the hall, and into a classroom. He was in our classroom before my friends and I had staggered through the cloakroom's open door. He was as stunned as we were, though for a different reason. I recall him saying over and over, after we'd been sent home and had come back to his office with our parents, “I'd just made the announcement. I'd just told them not to bring any firecrackers into school. I just can't believe it.” He couldn't believe it then. But I'm sure that our rebellion, as well as other acts of rebellion by children over the years, eventually turned him into a staunch, Bible-believing Calvinis - at least so far as the doctrine of total depravity is concerned.
