Kissing Frogs and Missing Princes

(a Steve Orr Bible reflection)

There’s this scene in the film Jesse Stone: Lost in Paradise where Police Chief Stone (Tom Selleck) attempts to mend a relationship with a woman he previously upset. But she’s frosty. She says she’s “kissed a few frogs” in her day and wonders aloud if Chief Stone is also such a reptile. When he offers to make it up to her “over a cup of coffee,” she quotes Mark Twain in response: “There's nothing to be learned from the second kick of a mule.”

You’ll need to watch the movie for the full effect, and for the resolution. In romance, it is our hope people will finally find what they’ve been looking for. We always want conflicts to resolve. But experience can be a cruel teacher, and some of us are slow to learn. 

That seems to be a running theme in this week’s Exodus and Jeremiah passages. God’s people were supposed to be in a committed relationship with God. But they just kept being drawn away to false gods, over and over. Still, you have to wonder: It’s not like they did these things in a vacuum. God kept giving them reasons to know that He was the real deal. He kept showing them that those false gods never delivered—that, at best, they were just frogs claiming kisses would make them princes. 

God’s people spent a lot of years “kissing frogs.” In fact, they kissed frogs for so long, they came to believe that was how things were supposed to be. 

Hopefully, we can read the Exodus and Jeremiah passages and learn their lessons. There’s no need to subject ourselves to a bunch of lies and liars trying to take God’s place in our lives. We should also be able to lean into what Jesus teaches in the Luke passage and the example of the Apostle Paul in the 1 Timothy passage. 

Because, after all, there really is nothing new to learn in the second kick of a mule. 

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“Stop Kissing Frogs!” (a short how-to article by Stephen White about focusing on what really matters):