Have You Seen The Little Piggies?

Does my title look familiar? It's a line from an old Beatles song. I think it is called "Piggies". Probably my least favorite of all the songs they did. Here are some images of pigs that I've run into lately. The first three pictures are from a festival of lights in Staunton, Va.. It's a display made by our local credit union. And I must say it's clever, since pigs are associated with greed, and this is a banking facility. The other picture was too adorable to resist snapping. It's a piggy bank at a local art show. I snapped the last picture from our T.V, just for fun. It is Dora The Explorer; an episode when she runs into the Pirate Piggies. When the three year old girls come over, they adore Dora. Pigs get a bad rap. They are all smarter than dogs, and can learn new tasks within five to ten attempts, on a par with or better than a chimp. They will learn to follow word commands, and years later still remember them. And the mother pig sings to her babies while she's feeding them. Remember the story of the mad man in chains who Jesus cured by sending the man's demons into pigs? The pigs then ran off a bank into a lake and drowned. This story must have a pretty important message, because it's in the books of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, all three. Two interesting things I found in this story. After Jesus performed this miracle, the men told him to go away. Yes, they were afraid, but they didn't like it that their source of livelihood, the pigs, were dead. Financial gain was more important to them than people. But not to Jesus. He saw this repulsive man in chains living in a graveyard, and helped him, thus showing us not to let appearances sway our decisions of who we help. The cured man then wanted to follow Jesus, and in one of the few times ever, Jesus told him no, to stay, and go witness to his family. My commentary says this makes sense because the people there had seen the way this man had been before, so would really believe he had been healed. So he needed to stay where people knew him in order to have a believable testimony. They say you can't make a silk purse from a sow's ear, but I think in this case, Jesus did just that.