Via e-mail I recently received select excerpts from a
delightful article my long-time friend Connie Nichols ran across in a magazine
at a
I have no idea what magazine Connie was browsing in, but the author of the article, a lady named Mary Thomas, shares some hilarious quotations from science exams taken by 11-year-olds. Here are just a few of them.
“When you breath, you inspire. When you do not breath, you expire.”
“When you smell odorless gas, it is probably carbon monoxide.”
“Blood flows up one leg and down the other.”
“Three kinds of blood vessels are arteries, vanes, and caterpillars.”
“The alimentary canal is located in the northern part of
“Equator: A menagerie lion running around the Earth through
“Magnet: Something you find crawling all over a dead cat.”
“Momentum: What you give a person when they are going away.”
If Mary Thomas is the science teacher whose students penned these gems, it’s a good thing she has a sense of humor. Otherwise her teacher-heart would break to find that her simple instruction could get so tangled in the short distance from her mouth to a student’s mind.
Having preached every Sunday for four decades, I can testify that the art of oral communication is anything but simple.
We speak one thing, and think we have spoken plainly, only to have our listeners go away having heard something we never remotely dreamed of.
Nothing humbles a preacher much more than overhearing one of his parishioners on Monday morning telling somebody what Sunday’s sermon was about. If a hundred people hear a sermon, they hear a hundred different sermons. Every time.
Which may partially explain the unexplainable differences between Christians who read the same Bible and worship the same Lord. We hear sermons about “imaginary lines” on the globe and come away absolutely convinced that “menagerie lions” are roaming the planet. And nobody can convince us otherwise.