Daily Devotionals
Devotional: August 3rd
Recently my wife and I went to St. Joseph Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky to visit a friend of ours who had surgery to repair three massive blockages and a bad aortic valve. Only problem is we never got to the hospital itself. After finding a parking place a couple of tiers back from the front entrance we started making our way to the entrance walking over a mounded landscaped area which was covered with a thin layer of snow. My wife made it fine. I didn't.
Don't you just hate falls? You know what I'm talking about. The ones where you start down and have no way to catch yourself and no way to stop and no way to control how you'll fall. That was my fall. An "oh-no-I-can't-help-myself" slide down a snowy mound onto a curb stone in a parking lot. It hurt. I landed oddly on my left hip and sent a stinging pain into my lower back. I lay there for a moment on the wet ground in the landscaped area within the asphalt lot. I was hurt and frustrated and hoping that nobody I knew saw me.
That's the bottom line with us men. We can handle the pain and the frustration at the sudden lack of coordination. But we absolutely cannot handle the fact that someone might have seen us and could hold our clutziness over our heads. The fall is bad enough. Being seen by someone you know is death itself. If seen, such comments as, "Coordination strikes someone every five minutes," or, "Could you show me that stellar move again?", will surely follow.
Truth of the matter is that most people fall sometime in their lives. They just suddenly lose their balance, their footing, their concentration or their way and they fall. Life is full of falls. Not just the physical ones either. There are also those times when we fall spiritually. The angry word, the too quick reaction, the unjustified jealous criticism; all examples of a fall. Sadly, people see us. Very few spiritual falls, if any, take place in a vacuum.
"Therefore let him who stands take heed lest he fall." 1 Corinthians 10:12 A simple warning from Paul. He based his warning on the failings of the Hebrew fathers whose lives were so well measured. Yet, they fell. They fell to personal pleasure, sexual immorality, religious superiority and self-centered murmuring. And they were seen...by God. We must make sure that we are on solid ground when we step. One slip and we could fall and take someone with us.
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