At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore (Ps. 16: 11)
“The slothful man saith, there is a lion in the way; A lion is in the streets” (Prov. 26:13).
When it comes to lame excuses, we Americans have a proverbial phrase of our own—“that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.”
What this proverb points to is the fact that a sluggard just needs something to say, no matter how absurd it might be. Any excuse will do. Any port in a storm.
There is a peculiar form of laziness that would much rather say outlandish things than to simply say nothing. A sluggard is late, and so he says, “Aliens kidnapped me. What year is it?”
The story doesn’t have to fit with any external realities or facts—it just has to be a thing that can be repeated. Under pressure the person can stop claiming there was “a lion in the way,” and retreat to “well, I thought there was a lion in the way.” Under even more pressure they might admit that they could have been wrong, but it was a belief that they sincerely held at the time.
The thing to remember is that Scripture says that you are dealing with a slothful man. His entire point was to avoid work, and so it might be a good idea to test his excuses with more than verbal comebacks. It might work better to say something like, “Well, I’m sorry the lion gave you a scare. But it’s gone now . . . let’s hit it.”
This is the point where you discover than when he was running from what he thought was the lion, he twisted his ankle.
