Amputated Toes & Pecked Out Eyeballs

My mind was blown this past Wednesday morning. 🤯 While eating breakfast, my daughter informed me that in one of the original stories from which Cinderella is based on, there was a bit more bloodshed than I ever knew. Do you remember the humorous animated scene when Prince Charming’s servant is trying to find the perfect match for the glass slipper that was left behind by a mysterious, disappearing princess?  Well apparently in the original story, to accommodate a small shoe, and a potential life of royal luxury they simply cut their feet down to fit. You read that right!  To fit themselves into the tiny glass slipper, one desperate stepsister cuts off her big toe, the other stepsister, a bit of her heel. Their ill-fated plans are foiled by the blood everywhere—go figure! The handsome prince learns of their trick from two doves who peck out the sisters’ eyes for their trickery. The now disgraced stepsisters then spend the rest of their lives as blind beggars. But Cinderella and her new beau live happily ever after. I had no idea!  So much for an innocent family fairytale. For some reason, in 1950, Walt Disney decided to leave that part of the story out. I think he made the right decision.
 
On my drive to work later that morning, a bit of irony struck me.  When we have young children and grandchildren, do we not try our best to spare them from viewing and hearing about gruesome, bloody stories?  When the evening or morning news is a bit too riddled with violence and murder, we will change the channel. If a tv show or movie is far too violent and gory, we will tell them to choose something else to watch.  If a video game is filled with nothing more than brutality and bloodshed, we’ll send them outside to play or nudge them to find another thing to occupy their time. For the most part, and especially when they are under our watchful care, we try to hide our children from bloody carnage and massacres. Can you even imagine sitting there watching Mickey Mouse Clubhouse or Sesame Street only to watch them start disfiguring themselves!?  This is the very reason we consult the MPA’s film ratings of such entertainment before we take our children into the theater or stream something into our living rooms. They’re far too young and innocent to be exposed to these things. 

That is, until they come to church…

Think about it…  Every Sunday morning they hear about a Savior who died for them.  After all, the cross is not some trendy piece of jewelry or heart-warming piece of art. Behind the plethora of cute cross decors we have strewn around our homes and offices, there is a message about just how far God was willing to go to profess and showcase His love for us. In its truest form, the cross is a symbol of pain and death.  Righteous blood flows from the cross. From the pulpit, in the scriptures, through the hymns, during Sunday school classrooms, our children regularly hear how they are “justified by his blood” (Romans 5:9), “the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sin” (1 John 1:7), “the blood of Christ purges us to serve the living God” (Hebrews 9:14), and “are made white in the blood of the Lamb” (Revelation 7:14). 

​How strange and beautifully ironic!  There is indeed a time and place, a context for everything. Though we may be right to hide parts of the unfiltered Cinderella story and shelter our young people from the onslaught of everyday evil and bloodshed evident in this broken world, there is an entirely different tone we take when talking about the blood of Jesus.  Like the Apostle Paul, we are not ashamed because we believe that this story of sacrifice is the very thing which brings us to faith and salvation. Jesus Christ is the sacrificial Lamb of God who was sent to take away the sins of the world (John 1:29). He is the atonement to save us all, to bring redemption and forgiveness, and to bring us into an everlasting relationships with God (Eph. 1:7, Hebrew 1:3, 1 Peter 3:18, 1 John 2:2, 4:10).  As Christians, we proudly and unashamedly talk about, and sing about, the wonder-working, powerful blood of Jesus!  🩸

“There may be some sins of which a man cannot speak, but there is no sin which the blood of Christ cannot wash away.” (Charles Spurgeon)