Wise as Serpents. Day 1

            In Matthew 10:16a we are told to be wise as serpents.  I was watching a show on the Discovery Channel about snakes that caught my fancy.  There are so many things that we can learn about how we are to be from looking at the snake.  Too many in fact for a one page blurb.  So I'm going to break these up a bit.  I'll try to keep them short and look at one, maybe two things a day.  Well, let's have at it.

            The thing that struck me as having tremendous spiritual weight was this...  snakes shed their skin at least once a year.  Sometimes they will shed more if they have grown a lot.  But it is not only the actual shedding of the skin but the benefits of doing it that I like.

            When snakes outgrow their skin, they shed it.  What is the skin in our lives?  Is it our behavior, our attitude?  If you have ever heard someone say, "You're too old to be acting like that." than you can get the picture.  Our spiritual lives are the same way.  We allow for certain vices in our lives.  We try to hold on to something that is ours alone.  A bit of ourselves that we feel so defines us that we can't let it go. These are things we have to shed because they will hold us back from spiritual growth. 

            Do you "tit for tat" everything that people do to you?  Do you say, "Hey that's my stuff!" when people need to borrow something?  These are the things we try to teach children not to do.  Have we not shed these skins ourselves? 

            Whatever it is that may be holding you back from growing you have to shed.  Your "skin" will suffocate you if you don't.  It will become so hindering that you will be in constant agony.  We each know things about ourselves that need to change so now is as good a time as any.

            Another very interesting thing about the whole skin shedding is the benefit.  With a snake, throughout the course of the year, ticks grab on and live off of its blood.  Since the snake has no hands it can't get rid of them until it sheds the skin.  With our spiritual lives it is the same way.  There will be things that are draining the spiritual life out of us that have become part of our behavior without us knowing.  When we shed our skin we will feel the release of some of those strongholds and be able, once the skin is off, to look at them and see where we had gone wrong and possibly understand why we were having such a hard time.  Then, once the skin is off, we can begin again to grow.

            Sssssee you sssssoon.

SDG