{"id":34625,"date":"2024-10-03T17:09:00","date_gmt":"2024-10-03T17:09:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.christianitytoday.com\/pastors\/preaching\/sermon-illustrations\/cannonball-that-wouldnt-stop\/"},"modified":"2024-10-03T17:09:00","modified_gmt":"2024-10-03T17:09:00","slug":"cannonball-that-wouldnt-stop","status":"publish","type":"sermon-illustrations","link":"https:\/\/www.christianitytoday.com\/pastors\/preaching\/sermon-illustrations\/cannonball-that-wouldnt-stop\/","title":{"rendered":"The Cannonball that Wouldn&#8217;t Stop"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One of the zany experiments staged by the &quot;Mythbusters&quot; television show nearly turned into a suburban tragedy in Dublin, California when the crew fired a homemade cannon toward huge containers of water at the Alameda County Sheriff&#39;s Department bomb disposal range.<\/p>\n\n<p>The cantaloupe-sized cannonball missed the water, tore through a cinder-block wall, skipped off a hillside and flew some 700 yards east, right into the Tassajara Creek neighborhood, where children were returning home from school at 4:15 p.m. There, the 6-inch projectile bounced in front of a home on quiet Cassata Place, ripped through the front door, raced up the stairs and blasted through a bedroom, where a man, woman and child slept through it all, only awakening because of plaster dust.<\/p>\n\n<p>The ball wasn&#39;t done bouncing. It exited the house, leaving a perfectly round hole in the stucco, crossed six-lane Tassajara Road, took out several tiles from the roof of a home on Bellevue Circle and finally slammed into the Gill family&#39;s beige Toyota Sienna minivan in a driveway on Springvale Drive.<\/p>\n\n<p>That&#39;s where Jasbir Gill, who had pulled up 10 minutes earlier with his 13-year-old son, found the ball on the floorboards, with glass everywhere and an obliterated dashboard. &quot;It&#39;s shocking &#8211; anything could have happened,&quot; Gill said after the van had been taken away as evidence, along with the cannonball.<\/p>\n\n<p>&quot;Crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy,&quot; said Sgt. J.D. Nelson, a spokesman for the Alameda County Sheriff&#39;s Department. &quot;You wouldn&#39;t think it was possible.&quot; He said the television crew was incredibly unlucky that the cannonball flew through Dublin, but &quot;tremendously lucky that it didn&#39;t seriously injure or kill somebody.&quot;<\/p>\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading is-style-article-subhead2\">Possible Preaching Angle:<\/h2>\n\n<p><em>Youl can use this to set up a sermon on the power of sin or hurtful words to inflict much more damage than we ever imagined. Just as the local police sergeant said, &quot;Crazy, crazy, crazy. You wouldn&#39;t think it was possible.&quot; That&#39;s what we all say when we see the impact of our hurtful words or sins against others.<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":0,"template":"","tax_ctp_audience":[],"tax_ctp_authors":[],"tax_ctp_categories":[165],"tax_ctp_format":[171],"tax_ctp_illustration_types":[411],"tax_ctp_multimedia":[],"tax_ctp_point_editor":[433],"tax_publications":[140],"tax_ctp_tags":[3370,3547,3677,3731,3753,3770,3878,4086,4282,4977,5178,5292],"tax_ctp_topics":[393,395,396],"class_list":["post-34625","sermon-illustrations","type-sermon-illustrations","status-publish","hentry","tax_publications-ct-pastors","tax_ctp_tags-accident","tax_ctp_tags-carelessness","tax_ctp_tags-consequences-of-sin","tax_ctp_tags-danger","tax_ctp_tags-deliverance","tax_ctp_tags-destructive-sin","tax_ctp_tags-error","tax_ctp_tags-gossip","tax_ctp_tags-irresponsibility","tax_ctp_tags-sin","tax_ctp_tags-tragedy","tax_ctp_tags-words"],"acf":{"scripture_references":[{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null},{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null},{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null},{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null},{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null},{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null},{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null},{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null},{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null},{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null},{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null},{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null},{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null},{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null},{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null}]},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v22.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>The Cannonball that Wouldn&#039;t Stop - CT Pastors<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.christianitytoday.com\/pastors\/preaching\/sermon-illustrations\/cannonball-that-wouldnt-stop\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Cannonball that Wouldn&#039;t Stop - CT Pastors\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"One of the zany experiments staged by the &quot;Mythbusters&quot; television show nearly turned into a suburban tragedy in Dublin, California when the crew fired a homemade cannon toward huge containers of water at the Alameda County Sheriff&#039;s Department bomb disposal range. 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