Vantage
point
Important things
I sat in my car at a quiet intersection
two blocks from my home. As I waited to turn onto the farm road, a sleek black
sedan came racing over the near rise easily exceeding the speed limit by 20
mph. Suddenly the driver cut the wheel to turn onto my street. But he was
going too fast. An instant before it was too late, he pulled out of the turn,
careened in front of me, tires squealing, and narrowly missed my car. He rumbled
across the shoulder throwing gravel up in a spray and fishtailed into oncoming
traffic, before disappearing, untouched, over the following rise at about
the same speed.
It had happened so fast that it
took me awhile to absorb what had almost happened. I realized that if the
young driver had not pulled out of the turn, his car would have hit me with
full impact on the driver’s door. I was a split second away from death
or major injury, and there was nothing I could have done.
Tornadoes recently ravaged the
Midwest. On the worst night of the supercell storms, tornadoes wreaked destruction
slightly to the north and south of our home, leaving us untouched except for
some falling debris. But 40 people in three states were killed that night,
including a man who had just returned from church and a mother and daughter
who attended an Assemblies of God church.
Most of the people killed were
in the protection of their own homes. When the reckless driver narrowly missed
me, I was at the same intersection in our quiet neighborhood that I had stopped
and turned safely at a few thousand times.
The Bible says, “Why, you
do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist
that appears for a little while and then vanishes” (James 4:14, NIV).
Death may strike anyone suddenly,
without warning, at any time. We must live our lives with two priorities:
to know Jesus, and to leave nothing undone that He has called us to do. The
time may come when those important things we have intended to do but neglected
can never be done.
— Ken Horn
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