Don Knoup dot com

Well, I’m rather embarassed to say that I spent about an hour tonight getting my car unstuck.  Thank God for a brother who was willing to get out of bed and come and help me and a wife who brought us shovels.  It wasn’t exact a major incident but we were trying to not damage the car getting it out.  In fact my left front tire was just inches from the road way and my rear tire was still on the road.  It wasn’t like a spun off the road and landed hundreds of feet off in some ditch somewhere. 

In fact when I got stuck it was actually while I was driving at a very slow rate of speed.  I stopped at the stop sign on Lundgren road as I was turning left onto Berglund.  As I pulled away from the stop sign I had no idea that the downward sloping intersection was a skating rink.  Try as I might to turn left onto Berglund road the car just wanted to keep going straight.  I caught just a bit of the snow which was banked up on the side of the road and despite the fact that I was barely off of the road way, my car was stuck and stuck solid.

Gosh, to tell you the truth i was suprised that there weren’t figure skaters or an ice hockey team out there in the intersection practicing on the ice.  I hit, what we call here in Northern Illinois, a patch of black ice.  We call it black ice because it is deceptively difficult to see.  The ice patches are almost hidden.  It seems as though they blend in with the black pavement below.  The truth is there is no such thing as black ice.  The ice isn’t black at all.  Actually it’s either white like the snow or it’s clear.  I have yet to sea any ice that is actually black.  

So often in life it is the thing that we don’t notice that trips us up.  It’s the thing that is hidden or disquised from our view.  But, if we would really pay attention, we’d know it was there.  Just like the ice, we could see the signs if we look hard enough.  Like tonight, for example, I knew it was extremely cold.  I knew there was snow.  If I looked closely enough I could have seen how the pavement glistened with the reflection of my headlights.  The hidden stumbling blocks of life that trip us up don’t have to take us that far off course either.

As we skid across the black ice of sin in our life, we don’t always end up in the ditch.  Sometimes we’re just a little bit hung up and we need a friend to help us out of our mess.  So here is the point:

1)  Look for the signs of sin in your life.  See the early warning signs before it’s too late.

2)  Take action to avoid the sin (black ice) in your life.  If you know it’s there, don’t just punch the gas and hope it comes out alright…do what it takes to avoid sin.

3)  When your stuck, find a friend that can help you deal with the sin your life and keep you accountable so you don’t wind up right back where you were.

4)  Remeber that their is one friend that sticks closer than even a brother.  No matter how stuck we might feel, God can pull us through anything.