TINKER AIR FORCE BASE, Okla -- Good Day, AFSC,
Here is this week’s Fun Friday Thought.
1 Peter 3:8-9 “ Finally, all of you, have unity of mind, sympathy, brotherly love, a tender heart, and a humble mind. Do not repay evil for evil or reviling for reviling, but on the contrary, bless, for to this you were called, that you may obtain a blessing.”
In life there are times when things are in our control and when things are not in our control. Hiccups, for example, are something that we cannot control. Did you know that all mammals hiccup? It’s true! Large animals, like the Asian elephant, to the smallest animal, the Etruscan shrew, all get the unexpected hiccups from time to time. That means as well lions and tigers and bears, oh my! Babies seem to do it most of all and even hiccup inside of their mother’s womb.
A hiccup occurs as a result of your diaphragm suddenly moving at the same time your vocal cords snap shut. Ultimately we don’t know the cause as to why our bodies would react that way, but it can often be experienced after having a carbonated drink, or laughing too hard, or eating too quickly. Sometimes they are funny and sometimes they are painful. Many people try to control their hiccups by holding their breath or eating a spoonful of peanut butter. Those methods may or may not work cause the truth is, hiccups are one of those things that cannot be controlled.
People, like hiccups, can’t be controlled either. We certainly do our best to condition people, or to train them, but ultimately we can’t control every aspect of other people’s moods or actions. That means that sometimes the people you encounter on a day-to-day basis may not be nice to you. There will be days where the person in your pod is going to annoy you. Or that co-worker might say something terrible to you. God would not want you to respond “evil for evil”. Rather we should look to him for comfort and help during these difficult times. We should pray for those who are unkind and seek to show kindness no matter how difficult someone is behaving. While we cannot completely control how people are behaving around us, we CAN control how we respond and react in those situations.
Fun Fact: Hiccups, while annoying, typically last only just a few minutes for the average person. However that was not the case for Charles Osborne. It was reported that Charles had the hiccups from 1922 to 1990! During that timeframe he would hiccup between 20 and 40 times a minute. It was estimated that over the course of his life he had hiccupped 430 million times!
Have a great weekend!