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Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Killing the Dragon

My close friend, Allen Laudenslager (who writes a blog at A Voice In The Wilderness)
shared this fable with me:

A father was reading his little boy a bed time story about a medieval village and a terrible, fire breathing dragon that terrorized it. 

The little boy asked his father, “Why didn’t they just kill the dragon?” 

His father replied, “Why son, the dragon was big and powerful, it viciously breathed fire, its hide was as tough as armor, and the villagers weren't able to kill it with their primitive weapons."

The little boy said, “No, I mean, why didn’t they just kill the dragon while it was still little?

And the moral of this story is that you ought to nip evil or wrong-doing in the bud as soon as you see it and not wait for it to become a bigger, unmanageable problem.
  
How many of us wished we wouldn't have smoked that first cigarette, drank that second beer, or eaten that second helping at dinner?  If we hadn't then we wouldn't be addicted to cigarettes or alcohol or be obese.  How many of us wished we'd made better career choices?  If we had then we wouldn't be stuck in miserable, dead-end jobs.  How often have we wished that our leaders made different choices like trying to prevent World War II, the Vietnam War, the 9/11 attacks, or the Recession?

The examples could go on and on, but the point is that little problems can snow-ball into bigger, unmanageable problems unless we nip them in the bud while they're still little, that is, kill the dragon while it's still little.  It's just so much easier.

Hind-sight is always twenty-twenty, but if you use the positive or negative examples of the past as how you should or should not do something, then you can slowly grow prudent and wise and make better choices each day.  Something else you can do is to pray for prudence and wisdom as God loves to pour out his wisdom onto those who ask.









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