Bacon Crisp, my husband, brought this empty candy wrapper home from work. He’s employed at a big box Christian retail store. I won’t elaborate on how charitable the company is to employees or the fact that 99.99999% of the items sold are manufactured in Chinese sweatshops. That’s fodder for a separate rant.

This little package tells a story. Though blurred, the label at the top reads:

SCRIPTURE CANDY

Reaching The World One Piece At A Time

I never would eat black jelly beans, but that’s the point here, isn’t it? To throw sin away? What if you are a little VBSer, who likes liquorice? Does that make you sinful? Oh, the guilt of anise. Not to mention the danger. The FDA announced last Halloween that too much black liquorice is dangerous and can lead to “abnormal heart rhythms, as well as high blood pressure, edema (swelling), lethargy, and congestive heart failure.” Better avoid sin.

But the idea of eating blood isn’t very appetizing either. Unless you’re a vampire. I once taught high school drama to a girl, who wore a vile of her boyfriend’s blood around her neck on a chain. The classy little perfume bottle weirded out her classmates. I wonder if the blood of Jesus in a jellybean would convert her? Hmmm. Kinda weirds me out too. Better toss the reds.

That leaves Clean (bland and colorless), Heaven (why is heaven yellow?), Growth (green like marijuana), Royalty (for those obsessed with Kate and Wills), and Thank You Pink (WTF?) It isn’t like Tom Sawyer’s scripture tickets. Not a single word on the package is actually quoted from the Bible. To including the primary source might lead a person to make an informed judgement, and we all know how dangerous that is.

The best part of the story is the split in plastic. Bacon found the empty package on the floor below the display. Shoplifted.