Wednesday, October 1, 2008

Indian summer and speeding tickets

No, I didn't get a speeding ticket. The reference is from our assistant pastor at Laramie Valley Chapel. He gave a great spiritual illustration that I know I'm going to butcher in my attempt to restate it, but here goes anyway:

Suppose you have several speeding tickets in your glove compartment. You’re driving down the street and you pass another cop, but this time you’re actually driving slower than the posted speed limit, so you don’t get pulled over. However, no matter how many times you drive by a police car under the speed limit, it doesn’t take away those speeding tickets from earlier. You don’t accumulate enough “points” by driving responsibly to make those tickets go away; you still have to pay them. Sin is like that. Every time you sin, you have to pay the ticket; being good other times doesn’t make the bad magically go away. The wages of sin is death – the only way to pay those sin tickets is paying them with death. Unless there is someone else who pays for you. Which is exactly what Jesus did for us, by dying for our sins.

Why do they call it Indian summer, anyway? Oh, who cares - it's sunny and in the 70's, and for once we haven't gotten any snow in September. The last two weekends we B. and I have gone on long trail rides up in the hills, when aspens turn golden is absolutely my favorite time of year. I can't get enough of it. It makes me giddy and dreamy at the same time.

The giddy/dreamy part is also because I'm so close to the end of my book (I can't say close to finishing it, because I know I have to go back and fill in some gaps, make lots of revisions, add more voice). Working on the last chapter is almost as hard as working on the first chapter, though. There's all these sub plots that need to get wrapped up, and it's much harder than I thought it would be. One night I finally gave up because what I was writing just wasn't coming out right. Then as soon as I laid down in bed (and it was midnight already, I really needed to get to sleep), my mind kicked in, and I started figuring out how to get everything into the ending in the right order. So then I started to worry that if I fell asleep I'd forget it all, so at 1 am I got up, wrote down some quick notes, and managed to settle my mind down so I could sleep.

No comments:

Post a Comment