What Was Once a Pint-Sized Hole
Hoover Dam is located on the Colorado River between Arizona and Nevada, and is the second tallest dam in the United States, at a height of 726 feet. (The tallest dam is the Oroville Dam in California.) Hoover Dam impounds Lake Mead, which is the largest reservoir in the U.S., measured by water capacity, supplying water to Nevada, Arizona, and California. At its current level, the lake holds over three trillion gallons of water. Every decrease in the lake’s water level by just a single inch would release two billion gallons of water, so just imagine if the engineers that maintain Hoover Dam ignored a breach, no matter how small, in the dam. The results could be catastrophic.
What was once little, if ignored, often becomes big. We so often neglect or ignore the “little” things, or we find ourselves in “little” sins, and over time if we do not make changes to those attitudes or actions, they become “big” things, and we wonder what happened. To be clear, God does not categorize sins as being big or little. To God, a sin is a sin. It is only us humans who often try to lessen the guilt by calling a particular sin or bad behavior “little.” You’ve heard the line, or maybe even said it yourself – “At least I didn’t do that!”
What I am referring to can be called “drift.” It is that slow migration from good into not so good, little by little, often without really noticing, until the pin-sized leak becomes a gaping hole. We drift in many areas of our lives, and we rarely, if ever, drift in a positive way. We naturally drift away from everything holy and everything wholesome. Think about your health, your relationships, your finances – without intentional and committed effort they tend to simply drift, a slow erosion, into something less than what they could be. And how about your relationship with God? That, too, drifts in a negative direction unless you purposely strive to become more like Him.
The Bible gives us the prescription to avoid drift. Here is what we read in Hebrews 3:12-13 – “See to it, brothers and sisters, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called “Today,” so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness.”
The way to help avoid drift is found in being in community with others. It is found in “we” not in “me.” We need to be checking in with each other and checking on each other. Why? The drift starts in our heart. And nobody knows, unless somebody has access to you. The Greek word used here for encourage is not just rah, rah, rah; it means exhort, plead, urge, appeal to. And the word daily literally means day after day after day. It’s an ongoing thing. It’s a relational thing.
So, I ask you today, are you flying solo or are you in healthy and loving community with others? Do you have others who can see your pint-sized hole before it becomes so big that the results are catastrophic?
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