Bo​az Baptist Chronicles

Now that I got your attention, allow me to freely speak to you about an experience that I had about two or three years ago.

This message is for preachers and pastors of the word of God.

A few years ago, together with a few of our immediate family members, we had invited some friends over, who happened to be visiting in our area, for a quaint get-together.

Well, as time went on in that gathering—everyone enjoying each others company; while sporadically taking bites of food—somehow I had managed to sneak off to our bedroom and continue a project I was working on, quietly closing the door, glad to get away from the fray. All of a sudden, I heard a commotion coming from the kitchen.

“I knew it,” I said to myself. “Someone's rehashing some bad blood that had been shed aforetime. And it was all happening—happening in 'MY' kitchen.”

As my ears leaned toward the sounds I could pick up that were coming through the closed door, I soon discovered that the sounds I first thought were hostile, were actually screams of desperation.

I ran out to see what was going on.

I followed those screams into the kitchen where the father of our guests was trying to revive his baby daughter.

She wasn't breathing.

His wife, who was either just holding the young baby in her arms or was breastfeeding her at the time [under a “blankie,”] made the discovery. We were all in a “panic.”

I thought to myself, “Let 'the father' take control of the situation ...after-all, it's his baby.”

All of a sudden, much to my surprise, the mother took the baby, opened her blouse, pulled out her breast, and, IN HER EFFORTS TO RESUSCITATE HER BABY, nervously tried to breastfeed it.

You say, “That's silly. Surely, no one in their right mind would try to FEED a baby, when, in reality, all it needed was AIR.”

Preachers, we do it all the time.

You preachers and pastors try to shove food down a baby Christian's mouth, when all it really NEEDED was just to breathe.

Clearly, this mother was disoriented and, as a result, got her signals confused. That much is clear. But, in her effort to see her baby live, she really was helping to impede the baby's survival with the WRONG cure.

In our effort to help someone in our care, how many of us do the same thing. We shove the holy breast of God's “sincere milk of the word” (I Peter 2:2) in front of someone's lips, while all they really needed was, simply, some air. (Could air in this scenario stand for the “air” of the Holy Spirit's communion/life...?)

We are not only supposed to "feed the flock of God" (I Peter 5:2), but help them keep breathing. The airway needs to stay unencumbered from anything that would block it from dying. And then, WHEN IT IS TIME TO FEED, we are do to that job, too.

Anything else, is sure SUDDEN death.

Pastor Bob

By the way, the baby lived.