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Psalms 133:1
How good and pleasant it is when brothers live together in unity!
Let me begin this morning by telling you a true, but very sad story.
Homer and Langley Collyer were born in the late 1800’s to an affluent Manhattan couple. The family lived in a luxurious three-story mansion at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and 128th Street.
All seemed good in the Collyer family. Homer earned an engineering degree; Langley became a lawyer.
Then mom and dad divorced in 1909. The boy’s, now in their 20’s, continued living with their mother.
The neighborhood deteriorated. Their mother died.
And Homer and Langley gradually retreated from society, finally locking the doors to their inherited mansion.
For the next almost 40 years they were nearly unheard from.
Then in 1947, someone reported a strong odor emanating from their address. It took seven policemen to break down the door and finally force it open.
You see, beyond the door all the space was overwhelmed with ceiling-high piles of rubbish.
The brothers had spent most of their adult lives collecting, and finally, hoarding junk. Old newspapers,
fading letters, moldy clothing,
rusting folding beds,
half a sewing machine,
broken old chairs,
fragments of a winepress,
old, old gas chandeliers,
a sawhorse,
the chassis of an old car,
a long out-of-tune Steinway piano,
a horse’s jawbone and…and that’s just a beginning of a long, long list of worthless items.
Once inside, the police found the two Langley brothers…dead… and
surrounded by 103 TONS of debris.
One brother was found laying just inside the front door and the other brother was later found, actually buried beneath a pile of junk that had fallen over and crushed him.
And your first thought, well maybe your second, since your first thought may well be, What does this have to do with forgiveness? is probably …Who would chose to live a lifetime overwhelmed by trash?
Well, actually there are millions of people who do this all the time – have their own private collections of
junk… admittedly of a different sort.
Someone’s jawbone has moved up and down and insulted them…and they have stored the hurt and the memory of that jawbone for years…
Someone else has left a tattered insult… another has deposited a broken promise… until the piles of accumulated anger, annoyance, indignation, bitterness and all such kind of emotions have left little room for anything else.
And as they collect this emotional garbage down through the years… its weight slowly crushes the grudge holder to death.
And, unfortunately, this can be any of us if we allow ourselves to become pack rats who collect painful moments of junk thoughts.
And it is junk… debris… refuse… that stinks up our lives if we will not forgive them.
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