The Fence

(c) Staci Stallings, 2005


We had just been talking about it. Not ten minutes before we were talking about what place God's rules should play in your life. Are they "in stone" so that God has something to point to when He throws you into the fire? "You should've known! I gave you the Ten Commandments, and you did it anyway!"

We had discussed our children and whether or not you can teach a child with "only love," or do you have to pound the rules into them? How will they know what's right and wrong if you don't set down the rules and make sure the child knows where they are? That was the question. Don't you need the rules to raise a child?

In the discussion I said what I've said in other articles, that God gave us the Ten Commandments because He loves us. He knows that there are times when we are so in the fog of "right now" that we, if left to our own experiences and understanding, might fall into mistakes that will forever alter our lives for the worse. He knows, and so He gave us a way to know "this is not done if you want to live a healthy, prosperous, successful life." So the rules are there not for punishment, but for love.

Shortly after our discussion, I walked outside to go to my vehicle, which was parked a considerable distance down the road. We were on the far outskirts of the town. There was very little ambient light from about a half-mile away. In short, it was dark out there. I was in a hurry, so I didn't wait for my eyes to adjust. I stepped off the porch and walked out to the parked cars.

Not familiar with the lay of the land, I strode passed the cars. Trying to figure out how I could get to my van without walking on the road-although there were no cars there anyway, I kept walking. I tried to see where I was going, figure out where I was even as I kept walking. Finally, my brain said, "Just find the road and then follow it to the van."

It's interesting how in the fog of "right now" my brain works. It keeps talking to me, trying to discern where I am, where I'm going, how I'm going to get there even as I keep going. Very rarely does it say, "Hey! Stop and figure it out before we go forward!" Oh, no. We're going, and we've got to get there.

Then I realized that my feet were brushing weeds. "Oh, it's the weeds. I'm in the ditch. The road should be right here..." Suddenly I found myself standing six inches from A FENCE! Not just any fence. This was a four level, barbed-wire, held together with metal stand-up fence posts. In less than a heartbeat, I stopped my headlong motion. I literally said, "A fence? What's a fence doing on this side of the road?"

Yes, I'm not always the brightest bulb in the lamp. Then I turned around and realized with some chagrin that I had gone passed the cars, through one ditch, onto and over the road, down and back up the other ditch, and I didn't figure out my mistake... until I suddenly saw that fence.

Funny, I think that's exactly the lesson we were just talking about minutes before.

~*~
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