Just a Vapor

I got a few emails today that were of the forwarding variety. As a Christian, I get a lot from other Christians that have interesting stories, prayers, or calls to action. I enjoy most of them. The one thing I despise about them more than anything is the last few lines. Almost without exception, they try to guilt you into forwarding them to everyone in your address book. That’s the surest way to make sure I won’t forward them to anyone.

It’s not just the Christian emails either. The ones about the little girls with lupus, or the widow of a soldier left to raise 18 kids when her husband was killed by falling helicopter parts. “If you have any compassion at all, you’ll forward this to everyone in your address book. You should also harvest all email addresses found in emails sent out in bulk that you have received in the last 720 days.”

The sad thing is, most of the emails about poor little kids dying of leukemia are fake. They were written by high school kids trying to get their jollies from sending out fake emails that they hope will eventually return to them. The more times they get it back, the bigger a trophy it becomes.

Please keep the following in mind when you get your next forwarded email:

• Bill Gates will not send you a check for $8000 for every email you forward in an attempt to test his new email tracking scheme
• That child does not have a rare lethal form of South African Dysentary, and the Breast Cancer Society won’t get a nickel for every email forwarded about a poor woman about to die, leaving her 37 children parentless
• Jesus will not send you to hell for deleting that email that said that if you are not ashamed of him, you’ll forward it to everyone in the Western Hemisphere. He sends people to hell for rejecting His provision for their sins
• You can NOT get a virus through email that is pure text. It has to be in the form of an attatchment or a Macro that exploits a hole in Outlook (BTW, that’s one of many reasons to use something other than Outlook)