People who know me well know that I tend to find humor in life fairly easily!  It might help that “things” just happen to me!  As you likely know if you read my columns, I recently moved.  Well, I moved to a very nice townhouse in a beautiful setting with many trees and ponds.

About a month after I moved in, I had to take a bag of garbage to the community dumpster.  I decided to walk and take a short cut across the lawn where I quickly disposed of the bag in the dumpster.  After doing that, I turned around to walk back to my home.

Have you ever had that feeling you were being watched or followed?  Well, I had that feeling and so I rather nervously peeked over my shoulder and there it was!  I was being followed by a goose!!!!  Generally speaking, I am not nervous around geese!  I grew up spending summers on the Finger Lakes in New York State and as an adult, I spend a good share of my summer in the Thousand Islands, also in New York State.  Both of those areas are plentiful in geese (the photo with this article is one that I took on my last visit over Labor Day Weekend in the Thousand Islands)!

Now, the funny thing is that the goose that was following me looked back at me and “honked” at me like it had something on its mind that was not good!  What was worse was that the goose began to run towards me and it was hissing!  So, what did I do?  Well, I picked up my pace just a little bit and then quite a bit!!! I am sure if anyone was watching they must have gotten quite a laugh out of a grown man being chased by a goose across the lawn!

I got back to my house and ran in the side door and quickly shut it!  It was a beautiful summer day and I had the windows open and the patio door open.  A couple of minutes later, I walked over to the patio door and much to my surprise, there was that goose (well, I cannot prove it was the same one but I have to guess it was)!  It was outside my door peeking in the house!  What was worse is that the goose called for reinforcements!  It called their family, then their extended family and eventually the whole colony!!!!  Before long, there were geese outside of all of my doors and windows and I was beginning to get this vision of a very strange version of Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds” movie! I decided to ignore them!  I had things to do around my house and a couple of hours later I had to run out to the store and the geese were gone.

Since I am always on the lookout for idea for this column, I also can often find a spiritual application to nearly any event in my life.  Especially during this time in my life as I had just recently rededicated my life to Christ and was working through some things in my own life.

Wasn’t that goose very similar to sin in our lives?  It often sneaks up on us and creeps into our life.  Once there, we often try to pick up our pace or run to stay a step or two ahead of it and finally, it surrounds us completely.  The one thing in this story that does not make a good analogy is that fact that I was able to ignore the geese and they eventually went away.  Sin, does not work that way.  However, if you confess that sin to Christ, you can forget about it and move on! Some of my favorite verses in the Bible are in Psalms, chapter 112.  Verses 8 through 12 say, “The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love. He will not always accuse, nor will he harbor his anger forever; He does not treat us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities. For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him; as far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us.” Read those verses again and really digest it!  God will forgive your sin and NEVER remember it again!  Don’t you wish we had that ability?  Don’t you wish the people in your life would do that?

An interesting following up to this story happened a few weeks ago!  I came home from work one day and it was another beautiful day!  I came in an opened up to doors and windows of my house again.  A few minutes went by and I heard a familiar sound!  That’s right … there was a “honking” noise coming from my patio door!  It was a goose!  Now, the odds of that being the same goose as before is probably very small but my mind went back to that day and the analogy that I had made and I remember thinking, “isn’t that just like the devil to remind me of that sin that God has already forgiven me for and forgotten”?  The devil (and maybe even some well-meaning people in your life) will do that from time to time and try to get you to think that you are not forgiven of the sin but do not ever doubt that once God forgives you, it is forgiven and forgotten FOREVER!

So, my question to you in all of this is, what problem or sin is following you around?  Get rid of it today and leave it with Christ!  He will make sure that it never comes back again as He removes it as far as the east is from the west!

In the meantime, the next time you see a goose following you around … just smile and walk a little faster!