News story dated January 30, 3006:
A visitor to a British museum destroyed a set of priceless 300-year-old Chinese vases after tripping up on his shoelace, the Daily Telegraph reports. The three Qing vases, dating from the late 17th or early 18th century, had stood on a windowsill at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge for at least 40 years. Their prominent position made them among its best-known artifacts, the paper said. The report was accompanied by a photo, taken by another visitor, of the culprit, an unnamed man in his 40s, attempting to pick himself up among the porcelain debris after last week’s accident. Steve Baxter, another visitor who saw the accident, was quoted as saying: "We watched the man fall as if in slow motion. He landed in the middle of the vases and they splintered into a million pieces." "He was still sitting there stunned when museum staff appeared. Everyone stood around in silence, as if in shock. Then the man started talking. He kept pointing to his shoelace and saying, ’There it is; that’s the culprit!’ (taken from ABC News Online, January 30, 2006).
From masterpiece to major mess – created to be a thing of beauty, preserved over the centuries – in one careless move it went from timeless treasure into tiny pieces of trash - what a tragedy!
Genesis 3:1-7 records God’s masterpiece – mankind - that turned into a major mess because of a moment of carelessness and disobedience.