February 21

Acts 28:3-5 (NIV)
3 Paul gathered a pile of brushwood and, as he put it on the fire, a viper, driven out by the heat, fastened itself on his hand. 4 When the islanders saw the snake hanging from his hand, they said to each other, “This man must be a murderer; for though he escaped from the sea, Justice has not allowed him to live.” 5 But Paul shook the snake off into the fire and suffered no ill effects.

He shook it off! I am not perplexed by that, but I am inspired to be like that. Aren’t you? Something really bad happens to you, like a poisonous snake bites you, and your response is to “shake it off”! How many times do things that are inconsequential drag us down and poison our souls? Forget about the big things like losing your job or crashing your car, (or getting that stupid flu that is going around – o.k., not that big but it was long), how about the small things of life? Think about all the relatively meaningless things that happen to you like a co-worker being rude or getting a parking ticket, we need to FOR SURE shake those things off. I would submit to you today that we need to shake everything off that tries to take our life! The plot of the enemy, if he can’t kill us, is to take the life out of us. This may indeed be an over simplification of what we are supposed to do – shake it off – but let’s remember what Jesus told the disciples to do when people didn’t accept them or their message, “shake the dust off from your feet”. Let it go, leave it behind, and keep moving forward.