Saturday, June 2, 2007

Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her. John 8:7 (8:3-11)

Someone sent me a group of jokes and stories the other day and one of them reminded me of this passage. It seems that a student in a writing class had an assignment to write a short story.

Like so many people, the student waited until the last minute to complete the assignment and failed to proofread carefully. One of the sentences in the story read as follows, “Marge stood at the head of the stairs, lost her balance and fell. When John found her, she was laying prostitute at the bottom of the stairs.” The week after the assignments had been turned in the instructor returned the graded stories. She had circled the sentence and written in the margin, “You need to learn to distinguish between a fallen woman and one who has simply slipped.”

Of course the writer had meant prostrate, not prostitute but in his haste he had failed to be sure he had typed the right word.

How many times do we get the wrong word when we hastily judge the actions or motives of others?
Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.
Robert Hidde