My memories of the ranch have revealed many things to me. Above all, I realize we were a bunch of kids who, given too much time and a little too much freedom, would create some pretty interesting memories. Unfortunately, some of those revealed a streak of meanness or cruelty that I did not see until much later in life. For me, some of this came out especially when I was out with Earl and waiting for him to finish his third nap of the day, something I was not allowed to do, or after an insane 3-hour drive over a distance of 15 miles!
I remember one time when I was at the Hogan with one of my brothers. I don't remember exactly who. It seemed like some of my brothers and I had an uncanny ability to create ways to have fun. This time, we learned that the gas stove in the kitchen of the house was actually hooked up! As we walked around the yard looking for things to cook, we heard the croak of a frog.
We spent the next hour finding the frog and catching him. We found him hiding in the float box. It took quite a while to get him out of his little concrete box in the ground. First, we had to burn out the spider webs of the dozens of black widows that were hanging out under the heavy wooden lid. Then we had to take out the forest of water plants and clear out the mud and dirt to find the elusive bugger. We also found several water dogs, or salamanders, at the same time. In our concerted effort to find the frog, we never realized we were actually doing work, something we tried to avoid as much as possible. That float box had needed a good cleaning for years. Had we been asked to clean it, I am sure we would have complained and griped about the messy work, but that day it was getting done with a smile and a song.
We took our catch into the house and decided we would test out the faith-promoting story that we had always heard in church about a frog and boiling water. It seems that if you attempt to place a frog into a pan of boiling water, he will hop out very quickly, but if you put him in a pan of cold water and slowly heat it up, he will be quite comfortable till he gets boiled. The moral had something to do with sin and how little ones become greater ones. Evidently frogs are quite sinful by a matter of nature, and we needed to test the story ourselves.
So we did our own scientific test. We only had one frog and two possibilities in the parable, so we decided to go with the one we weren't completely sure about. We knew that the slow boil test would almost certainly work. We got a big pan, filled it with the well water, set it on the stove, and turned it on high. The frog was joyfully swimming in the sink, not knowing his fate. Once the water was at a roiling boil, we gathered up that frog and tested the parable. If our church leaders were telling the truth, that frog would hit that water, realize how hot it was, and thrust his way out, not harmed in the least. That's the way the parable goes.
We found out that there is a reason that Jesus did not use this parable in the bible. Jesus would have known that before you use a parable to a bunch of teenage boys, you really have to know what the actual results would be, unlike our well-meaning church teachers. As soon as that frog dropped into the water and submerged, his entire body puffed up like a balloon,and his arms and legs stuck straight out, completely immobilized. His eyes nearly popped out of his head, and in a few moments, he was completely cooked.. We decided that the frog must have been a severe sinner with no chance, or the story we had been told so many times was 100% Incorrect and had never been researched thoroughly.
We then had to clean up our mess, try to cover the smell of boiled amphibian, bury the critters, scour the pan, and clean up the water before Earl woke up from his nap, which we did just in time. We had learned not to believe everything that we heard in church and realized that some of those older people often related things they had heard, but never tested, and it was probably good just to listen and nod our heads. Either way, we learned a great lesson about parables, and Earl got a clean float box and a kitchen cleaning that had been necessary for decades.
We got an interesting memory of a poor bloated and boiled frog who just happened to be the subject of a poorly thought-out teaching parable.
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