A Word For This Wednesday

This morning after I walked my kids to the bus stop, I stopped and chatted for a second with one of the moms in our neighborhood, who was parked on the hill, waiting for her boy to hop on the bus. While we were talking, her car cut off. Hmm. Immediately I peaked into her car and looked at the gas gauge. It was past empty. Oops. Now, she gets no judgement from me. More often than not, my gas tank is closer to empty than it is to full. Why do we do that? I had a teacher in college once tell me, "You know, Travis, it takes just as much effort and money to keep your gas tank staying close to empty as it does keeping it close to full." Yeah, yeah. Whatever.

She said that they just got a new battery and just had a tune up, and everything should be fine. Then she said, "But my car tells me that I have 15 miles left before it's empty!" I told her that sometimes our cars lie to us. We thought that maybe if she let the car roll down to the bottom of the hill, getting the car off of the slanted road, it might start. And then she could make it to the gas station just a stone's throw away from our neighborhood.

And that's what she did. And it worked.

And I thought about me. And you. So here's what I think God would say to us today: Make sure we are standing on solid ground. Level. Sure. True.

And let's make sure our tanks are filled before we go anywhere. Even the short destinations in life require it.