THE LAW OF GRAVITY HAS NOT BEEN REPEALED

      When I was six years old and visiting my grand mother in southwestern Virginia I learned a very valuable lesson.  The law of gravity had not been repealed.

     I was a flat-lands boy from the coastal region of Norfolk, Virginia. Dig down six feet and you hit water.  Now I stood at the top of a hill that begged not to be ignored.  Within seconds, with more exuberance than wisdom, I was speeding faster and faster over God’s green earth. I had never run with such little effort.  I had wings on my heels.  I was superman and I had not even had Krypton for breakfast.

     What joy!  What exhilaration!  What freedom!  What a problem!

     By the time it was too late to change my mind I was speeding past huge boulders and missing them by inches.  I leapt over smaller ones.  Fortunately, when my out of control journey ended I found myself soaking wet in a creek that lay at the bottom of the hill.  Had I veered a little to my left the consequences would have been far more severe.  There the ground dropped off and created a veritable cliff.

     Now many years later I reflect that life is like that.  There are choices that get us into trouble and out of trouble.  Once we have started down wrong roads it is often hard to put on the brakes.  1 Cor. 10:23 put it well, “Everything is permissible - but NOT everything is beneficial…(and) not everything is constructive.”

     Daniel Boone used to say, “I never got lost but I was once powerfully confused for three whole days.”

     When I returned to Miami not that long ago, I had driven over 1000 miles and flown over 4000 but I was never lost and I was never confused.  The reason is quite simple.  I had maps and I used them.  The pilots had electronic maps and they did the same.  As I drove had I ad-libbed my way through my journey I might have ended up in Memphis, TN instead of Raleigh, NC.  Since the pilots were flying planes infinitely faster than my car any errors they might have latched on to would have created even greater disaster.

     “Life is hell,” said the man who sat beside me on the plane.  Then he told me about his life’s travels.  As he shared so many wrong choices I thought to myself.  For you, how could it be otherwise?  If, in our lives we travel the wrong highways, make too many wrong turns and take no directions from a Savior who says, “Follow Me,” then life can be hell and getting lost can be very easy.

     Many years ago while traveling in Maine, my wife and I made the wrong decision by interpreting a line on the map as being what it was never intended to be.  Since we had never gone that way before, it looked like an interesting road to travel.  We thought our decision a good one.  It wasn’t.  As the miles unwound, the road grew worse and worse. The ruts deeper and some places, where snow had recently melted began to look impassable. Several times I accelerated and skidded across sections I would never have negotiated at a moderate speed.  It went from scary to can we ever get where we’re going from where we are?

     Life’s like that.  We’ve all made bad decisions, and if we’ve been lucky, we’ve escaped more scared than scarred.  It is why, of course, every time we say, Yes, we had better look very hard at what we’re saying Yes to.

 

(THREE RECENT THOUGHT PIECES ON WYRICK’S WRITING’S “Wisdom is”  “Who Wins if You Do Nothing but Battle Life?”  “A Journey Through Grief”

 

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