It Sucks to Get Eaten

Once upon a time, there was this person who did Bad Thing A, Bad Thing B, and even Bad Thing C!  Clearly, he needed a dose of Jesus.  So he found Jesus, and then the members of his church did Good Thing D, in which they invited him to participate.  Next year, he will definitely have the time to do Good Thing E.  

Yeah, occasionally, if you’re gonna get nitpicky, he slips up and does Bad Thing F.  But because of the wonderful mystery of Jesus, whenever that happens (which is only about once that anyone discovers), he can bend over in prayer, be filled by Jesus’ Grace, and stop doing bad things forever (except for the occasional slipup which he only has when he forgets Jesus!).  

Anyway, it sucks to get eaten.  

Really, think about it.  It sucks--sucks hard--to get eaten.  

Imagine that you’re some gazelle, and you wake up that morning, go out to get something to eat, find a great breakfast (this place where all the right kinds of plants are growing and what they are growing is at the perfect stage), and start having a few bites.  You’re smarter than other gazelle, and while you chew, you think about how there might be a way to not have to search for breakfast every morning.  Instead, if gazelle learn how to put in the ground those little things from which plants grow, select and gather those little things based on those things falling by the plant that are good to eat, then all the good things could grow in a certain spot.  If gazelle just learn to push those things into the dirt at the proper spots, then there would be, late each spring, the good kind of plants growing right there.  The gazelle could even work together to use their back hooves to push this collection of heavy logs between those plants and where lions usually go.  When gazelle do that, there would be a great chance to eat every day without risking lion attacks!  And if they just—  

Holy crap a lion!  It’s coming this way, right for you so fast, and—  

As we were staying, it sucks to get eaten.  All of the gazelle should obviously have made sure that they hadn’t let that happen.  If they’d just done that plan a few years ago, then they could’ve saved the best of them from that lion attack.  They didn’t do that, though.  However, they could have just kept that one gazelle alive and then they would have received huge benefits from that gazelle’s plans.  It is so obvious that that gazelle had a good plan.  If all the gazelle had just implemented that plan before the lion-attack it would have saved not only that gazelle’s life, but the lives of many more gazelle.  Many.  The entire process of being a gazelle would have been changed.  Lions would have, in large part, stopped being able to eat gazelle.  

However, any of that happening is irrelevant.  It sucks to get eaten.  Everything that the killed gazelle could ever do, could ever think, would be gone.  

When discussing decay, we should remember things like that: things like how very much it sucks to get eaten.  How very much it sucks to decay.  

What is important to note here is not only the extreme unlikelihood of gazelle implementing that one hypothetical gazelle’s plans, but how there is no real control over the lion eating that gazelle.  People will not like going through decay, but decay will happen whether or not they like it, and how much or how little they feel.  Consider that when you yourself face manifestations of decay within your life: you cannot stop decay.