DIFFICULT ISSUES FOR CHILDREN
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PRETENDING TO BE AN ANGEL MAKES JESUS CRY

Once upon a time there was a little girl who thought she was better than the other children. Her mother doted on her and spoilt her terribly. She was a poor child, but proud and presumptuous; there was a bad foundation in her, as the saying is. Do you know what the word "presumptuous" means? It means that she thinks that she is good and that other people have to make way for her and stop what they're doing in order to keep her amused all the time, and expects lots of money and allowances, even like five dollars a week!

As she grew older, she grew worse rather than better; but she was pretty, and that was her misfortune; otherwise she would have been more sharply reproved than she was. But she thought that just because she was part of a loving Christian family, she could do whatever she liked.

One day, she was thinking in her room, quietly for once, about what it would take for other people to bow down and worship her. Then she realised that what people worship most after God and Jesus is angels, in the sinfulness of their hearts, usually because they are Catholic, but sometimes even when they are Protestant.

And so it was that she ran out and used her $5 to buy an angel costume. She put on the angel costume, and her eyes twinkled with pride. "How much everyone will like me when they see how pretty I am in this pink gauze!" she thought in the vanity of her heart. And she ran out once more onto the street.

But she wasn't thinking. She wasn't looking where she was going. And so it was that a cement mixer came round the corner at 100 miles an hour. And by the time the driver could stop, there was nothing left but a flat symmetrical pink shape on the road. Because Jesus couldn't stand to see her so proud and vaunting of herself.

MORAL: Pretending to be an angel makes Jesus cry and sometimes he lashes out to teach people a lesson. Don't let that person be you.




Her eyes, twinkling with pride, fix on the camera in all the vaingloriousness of which the men and women of this world are capable. And yet, had she grown up into womanhood, she could have ended up selling her body as a diseased streetwalker, giving germs to innocent men who yield to temptations beyond their control. Such is the fate of all who try to feign a goodness which only God's handservants can ever know for real. Reader, do not chuckle and think that you are beyond such sin!