Southminster Presbyterian Church

I'm not a big fan of flat tires.  Not that many people I know are - except maybe for tire repair shops - but I really don't like them.  I've been fortunate that I've never had a flat tire on my car, and the last time I blew a tire on my bike was at least 15 years ago.  Well, I almost had a tire blow out on me a month ago, but I caught it before it did.  So that doesn't count.

 

While I haven't had to deal with flat tires, my father-in-law has.  Regularly.  I think the tire shop installed magnets in his wheels, I've never known anyone to get flats as often as he does.  Apparently, it's not just my father-in-law, though.  I saw two cars today, within 5 minutes of each other, with right rear tires going flat.  That was weird.  What was more interesting to me though, was that both of these people had no idea their tire was going flat until I said something to them.  It would seem to me that a flat tire is something you would notice - it kind of stands out, you know?  The car lists to the side, it doesn't handle correctly, the odd metallic clank when you drive over a pothole, etc.

 

But it isn't always that obvious.  Sometimes, it's a situation where you realize something isn't quite right, but you don't know what, so you keep on going as if everything was fine.  Maybe you don't even know something is off at all.

 

More often than not, our spiritual journey is the same way.  We live our lives, we seek to be faithful to who God would have us be and what He is calling us to do, we strive for holiness in our lives.  But more often than not, we end up with a flat tire.  Maybe we hit a huge pothole and know immediately.  More often, though, we run over a nail without knowing it and have a slow leak.  We begin to notice that something is just off in our life and our walk with the Lord (for the two are really inseperable, aren't they?), but we can't figure out what.  Most of the time, we need someone else to help us see that there's a problem.

 

You see, we weren't meant to go through this life, let alone this spiritual journey of the life of faith, by ourselves.  As the writer of Hebrews encourages us:

If something seems off in your life, find a brother or sister you can sit down with and talk things through.  Don't be afraid to ask the hard questions or to hear the hard answers.  Sometimes we need others to shine light into the darkness of our own lives so we can deal with the issues or entrenched sins in our lives that are keeping us from truly living the fulness of life that Christ offers to us all.  Sometimes we just have to remove a little nail and patch the hole.  Sometimes the entire tire needs to be replaced.  But we can't do it without our brothers and sisters alongside us.

 

God bless you as you continue to pursue our Lord and Savior, in spite of the flats that assail us all.