Respect the Pouch

Ok, this is REALLY, REALLY GROSS. But, Maddy, you have to read it, because it actually does have a Bible message, believe it or not.
At AWANA, I’m a Cubbie Leader, and today we took the Cubbies on a trip to "Jerusalem", which was actually the room in our church where we stash the donuts. We pretended like we were very tired from our long journey and sat down at the table to eat a snack of Twinkies and Capri Sun Wild Cherry Juice Pouches.
Well, (here it comes), my Capri Sun tasted a little funny, and I didn’t know why. I checked the expiration date, but it wouldn’t go bad till April 2009. It wasn’t sweet, didn’t taste like typical cherry Capri Sun, and it had a sticky, goopy, sickly flavor and texture.
So, being the great friend that I am, I offered a drink to Hannah and asked her if she thought it was a little odd. She took a sip and said that it just wasn’t as sweet as hers.
Well, ok, it wasn’t sweet. But it was more than that, I knew it. This thing was – well, downright gross! And that was the first time I had ever thought that towards a sugary drink!
I looked at the pouch again and, to my horror, saw green crust around the place where you stick the straw! Yeah, like boogers, or intestinal fluid of some poor creature or something. Guts, maybe. Then, my stomach knotting, I looked into the straw and – EW!! There was gray goop with blackish specks all down through the straw, like silly putty or worm guts or something. I gagged and had visions of me waking up in the middle of the night, all alone in my bed, stomach heaving, gagging, puking, and from me pouring various body parts of rats, crickets, snakes, and whatever THAT was that was in that drink. Well, I’m happy to say I’m still alive here today to tell you my story of woe.
So, what does this have to do with God? I thought about this while awake at night, telling myself I was soon to be dead. And it came to me.
Maybe, just maybe, inside that disgusting pouch was somebody’s rotting heart! Yeah, like a toad’s or something. But I tried to think of it like your heart (well, not yours, everybody’s).
That pouch (in this case, your heart) started out as a sweet, wonderful, perfectly good thing. Then some bacteria (sin) got into there, only God knows how or what it was exactly. It was just a little bit of sin, a teensy, weensy bit. No harm there, right? Nobody’s perfect. But then that sin grew (yuck) and grew, becoming bigger and bigger. And bigger, nastier sins came in until there were millions and millions of little and big sins floating around in your heart. Gross, huh? It probably got pretty bad in there. If only you knew what was in your heart (or, in my case, in that pouch)! But you don’t know. So, then, God opened up your eyes, and you decided to take another look at yourself. Yeah, just look at you! But God (in this case, my mom) offered to give you a brand new, perfectly good heart (pouch) if you just threw yours away. That’s all you had to do. And, when you took that heart from God, you opened it up and used it. And it was sweet!