Mable Jernigan strained as she lifted her paper bag of groceries off the check out stand. "May I help you with your bag?" the sacker asked.
"No thank you, Sonny. I'm a tough ole gale. I can carry one sack of groceries," Mable replied.
But this sack was really heavy. The store had a special offer--3 cans of green beans for a dollar--and Mable bought six dollars worth, plus her usual gallon of milk, half gallon of orange juice, and five cans of cat food.
Mable started walking toward her car squeezing the bag tighter and tighter. As she felt it slipping down her body, she threw her legs into high gear and began to race against the invisible force of gravity. But just as she reached her car, the bag collapsed and gravity won, as tin cans bounced around her feet--fortunately missing her toes.
Mable looked at the empty bag with the blown out bottom that she was not holding in her hands. Then she flung that bag into the wind and it began to scoot like a sailboat, across the parking lot and toward the trash bins.
Mable's accident has been immortalized in a short, original poem by me:
A brown paper bag collapses,
Yielding to the invisible force,
That constantly strives,
To seize its contents.
Empty,
Now the mutilated bag,
Is a prisoner,
Of the wind.
The moral is that there are invisible forces (like temptation, anger, addictions, peer pressures, bitterness, and genetic tendencies) that are constantly trying to get you to drop the contents of your character. But if you surrender and your moral bottom falls out, you are going to be blown around--a prisoner of invisible forces.
"He who listlessly drifts with the tide, yielding to every appetite or passion, will soon dash a broken wreck on the sullen rocks that lurk unseen in the river of life." --William C. Hunter
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