WHAT THE H---?

A wise man once said about life, “life sometimes is like licking honey off a thorn”! This makes perfect sense to us, we understand the obvious, we are very aware of not only the danger of traumatic weather in our lives, but also the danger of the traumatic storms of life. But, what about that “perfect” weather that lull’s us to sleep and then simply destroys our life? We all love life when we look around and realize it can’t get any better than this, yet we often forget, it can get a heck of a lot worse! The scriptures tell us and teach us one important facet of life, and that is, there are no guarantees of tomorrow, but what we do have is today! I want to share a couple of real life examples from Dave’s life and mine, but first I want you to look around. Where is your life, is it so good it can’t get any better? Remember life is like a quarter, one flip and it changes everything! We were in our late teens and working at our body/detail shop. The business was booming and we were driven to be the best in Southern Illinois. Dave was seeing a beautiful young woman from Washington, Illinois and she set us up on a double date with her friend. Needless to say, this went well, her friend was smart, and as beautiful and wonderful as Dave’s girlfriend. We were working 70-80 hours a week and were committed to seeing these young ladies every other weekend. The relationships blossomed, the idea of love was becoming more real to all of us. Life, as that “perfect” day, seemed as good as it could possibly get! We would spend time at the lake in Pekin, Illinois, spend time at the drive-in, hit every dance they had at the schools, we were burning the midnight oil to be the best professionally we could be, yet everything was working like a well oiled machine. Then, the inevitable begin to happen! Remember that quarter flipping in the previous paragraph, it began to flip in ways that turned that “perfect” day into a lightning bolt! All of a sudden the deadlines for the automobiles began to increase, the perfection of our work was more demanding, the time to slip away became less and less. Please, understand the idea of potentially losing two young women that were as committed to us as we were them, even though we were 3-4 hours apart was devastating. It slowed to once a month, then once every 6 weeks and so forth. We burnt the phone lines late into the night to try and hang on to what we knew was real, yet we understood, these ladies, as wonderful as they were, could not hang on forever. A choice had to be made, do we risk losing two of the most important people in our life or be the best professionally we could be! It really doesn’t sound like a devastating event, but it was, we made a choice, and back then it turned out to be the wrong one!