Here in New England, there are lots of older homes with lots of old medicine cabinets. If you have a steel in-wall cabinet, usually painted white with a mirror on the door, then look around inside and you will likely find a slot. The slot will be in the back or bottom, roughly two inches long and just about wide enough to let a penny or even a quarter slip through. Maybe you're reading this bulletin at home right now, so go check and 1 will wait here for you

Ok, so if you have such a thing you might wonder what that slot's all about. Chances are you don't have a label telling you what it is, but you might. Even more likely is that you have never used that little slot for anything, at least probably not for its intended purpose,

I never knew myself, and I surely wasn't thinking about it one day looooong ago when I was helping my grandfather redo his kitchen, He had decided to change part of the basic floor plan of his house, moving out a wall a bit and I think getting rid of a closet to make his kitchen much longer. This was a house he had owned for about 40 years at the time (I believe he lived in that house for around 60 years of his life, all told) and grandma had asked for more cupboards and counter space. Expanding the outside of the house wasn't practical, so instead he had to adjust the inside.

He'd made good progress with his reciprocating saw, removing a high section of wall that needed taken out when a shower of black and silver items started falling through the newly opened hole in the ceiling all over the place. I was going to pick them up for him but was not allowed because I was so young, instead I believe the task was given to my older brother. Turns out they were razor blades. Decades and decades of the things. Ever notice the bathroom-of a house is usually right above the kitchen? For the plumbing.

Now, you young people think that razor blades are these Gillette gizmos that come in pairs or triplets, and are embedded in little plastic doodads that you click on to a razor. When I started shaving, I had to use the straight razor blades that you changed by cranking the razor open like a pair of garage doors by turning a knob on the bottom. A dainty item, shaped from a flake of metal, with an edge on either side. That's what these were. Devilishly sharp from any angle, prone to nicking your skin easily, and even handling out of the package they could cut you if you weren't very careful!

And now you understand why you might have a slot on your medicine cabinet to dispose of these evil blades safely. Who knows how many houses have these behind their walls from years gone past

Out of sight, out of mind, That may be how we treat a little casual sin in our lives, Oh, we don't view a cross word now and then all that bad on its own, just as we think a single razor blade isn't all that dangerous. So we forget about them. But one day, the might come pouring down on us unexpectedly, Just because we forget them doesn't mean they go away, they're still there. God doesn't forget about them, So we kid ourselves and say we have pretty good lives, and overall we're pretty good people, all the while tallying up these "little things" and storing them away, Imagine if they were all in a bag, and one day they all got dumped out at your feet. How many times have you done an unkind thing and thought "oh well, what's done is done" and offered no apology for it? Or let yourself go "just this once"? I guess what I want to stress today is that sure, a cruel knife cuts deep but a little razor blade can bring on a lot of hurt, too, And the difference, in the end, is quite "razor thin", Think about it.

Randy