The Cookies

Author Unknown,
rewritten by Jeff Hamilton

At an airport one night, with several long hours before her next flight, a woman hunted for a book in an airport shop. She also bought a bag of cookies and then found a place to sit.

She was engrossed in her book but noticed out of the corner of her eye that the man sitting next to her boldly grabbed a cookie from the bag between them. She pretended not to notice; after all, she didn’t want to cause a scene.

So she munched on the cookies. As the gutsy cookie thief diminished her stock, she found herself getting irritated as the minutes ticked by. “If I wasn’t so nice, I would blacken his eye,” she thought!

With each cookie she took, he took one too. When only one was left, she wondered what he would do. With a smile on his face and a nervous laugh, he took the last cookie and broke it in half. He offered her half as he ate the other. She snatched it from him and thought, “This guy has some nerve! He’s so rude! Why he didn’t even bother to say ‘Thank you!’”

She could not ever remember being so annoyed and sighed with relief when her flight was called. She gathered her belongings and headed to the gate, refusing to look back at the ungrateful thief.

She boarded the plane and sank into her seat. Then she pulled out her book. As she looked in her bag, she gasped in surprise. There was her bag of cookies!

“If mine are here,” she moaned in dismay, “the others were his! I was eating his cookies!” It was too late to apologize. She was the rude, ungrateful thief!

How often do we act in absolute certainty only to later discover what we assumed to be true was not? Keep an open mind, and don’t let pride blind you, you just never know – you might be eating someone else’s cookies.

For Further Study

Verses to Consider

  • Joshua 22:9-34
  • Proverbs 17:9
  • Isaiah 29:20-21
  • Matthew 7:1-5
  • Matthew 18:15-20
  • John 1:46
  • Romans 2:1-3
  • Romans 14:13
  • Galatians 6:1
  • Ephesians 4:31-32
  • Colossians 3:12-15
  • Philippians 2:1-4
  • I Peter 3:8-11
  • I Peter 4:8

Questions to Ponder

  1. Why didn’t the man say anything to the woman?
  2. What could have been done that would have lessened the problem and the embarrassment?
  3. Why do people make assumptions? Why are your assumptions sometimes wrong?
  4. When approaching someone else about a problem, what must be kept in mind and how should it be handled?
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