Conscience

Pastor was talking about his conscience this morning ....

There were woods on both sides of the street where I grew up, behind the houses. On the far side there was an intermittent stream that ran between banks of clay after a rain. When I was a young boy, around six or seven, I used to go down there and build a system of dams and lakes across the little stream out of the clay.

One time I remember clearly when I arrived there I found that a swarm of yellow jackets had built themselves a home in the clay bank. Annoyed, I placed a flat rock over their hole.

I then could go to work on my construction enterprises. You see, my penchant for industry and building things goes back a very long ways. However, as I worked, the prison and the prisoners that I had created began to worry at me, and I grew more and more fretful about what I had done. Finally, I could not stand the guilt any longer and so I went back and rolled that rock away.

Nowadays, I look back at that incident and I realize just how formative it was, because ever since then I have had this tendency not to always want to listen to my conscience ...