Michael Brent Jones

I__ like to share with you a parable: the parable of Bob the Angel.A girl was walking down a darkly lit city street late at night. A man jumped out from the shadows and attacked her, suddenly she was suffocating and disoriented as hands clasped around her neck and the force of his attack started to push her down. She tried to yell as she struggled to pull his arms from her neck while she crumpled backwards to the ground, __od . . . help me!_ The next thing she remembers__ust as the fear consumed her, and right as she disappeared into the misery and despair of helplessness__as a loud crash and an explosion of glass which rained down upon her and her attacker. The assailant__ lifeless body was suspended above her, held from collapsing on her by an unknown force, and then pulled away from hovering over her and dropped onto the pavement beside her. She opened her eyes in the faint shadowy light, to see black matted hair and a long, black beard framing the eyes of a man. The smell of alcohol on his breath would have knocked her out if the adrenaline was not still trilling through her veins. There he stood, God__ angel, off-kilter and drunk, with a broken whiskey bottle in his hand. __ou probably shouldn__ be walking through here this late at night,_ was all he said as he turned away.__ait! What__ your name?_ she asked, still stunned half sitting up on the ground.All she heard as he walked away was his trailing voice calling, __ob__ as good as any. . . ._ An angel is a messenger, and sometimes we only want letters sent in white envelopes with beautiful gold print, when sometimes a simple __o_ on the back of a gum wrapper is what we are offered. Every postcard from heaven does not come with a picture of the sunset there, nor should it. If it is an answer we want, an answer we will get. As far as pretty postcards, there are many others willing to send us that. If not harps and gold-tipped wings, what then is the mark of an angel? An answer which pierces your soul, and which inspires a question that invites you to look outside of yourself and up to God.

Pride is not looked at as a weakness, though it is the epitome of it. You might hear 'oh that poor alcoholic probably had an awful upbringing' but you never hear any sympathy for a prideful person, 'poor thing is probably horribly insecure, maybe we should validate him as a person to help him out.' That's what you should hear, but you won__. What I will say though, is that the key to curing pride is not so much in loving others more, but actually in loving yourself more. Loving your neighbor as yourself does no good if you don__ love yourself.