Lent@Landmark: Day 28

I was driving down a hill one rainy day in Tallahassee, which a strange phenomenon to those of you in Pinellas County, I know. I wasn’t even going very fast, but but when I saw brake lights ahead and tried to slow down, my tires didn’t seem to care. I began a slow-motion slide closer and closer to those lights. I was about to have a tough decision to make, and groaned, “Oh… this is gonna hurt.”

'After we had been there a number of days, a prophet named Agabus came down from Judea. Coming over to us, he took Paul’s belt, tied his own hands and feet with it and said, “The Holy Spirit says, ‘In this way the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem will bind the owner of this belt and will hand him over to the Gentiles.’ ”

When we heard this, we and the people there pleaded with Paul not to go up to Jerusalem. Then Paul answered, “Why are you weeping and breaking my heart? I am ready not only to be bound, but also to die in Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus.” ' (Acts 21:10-13)

Paul’s decision had much higher stakes—life and death stakes—to be exact. Would he stay away and choose safety, or was he willing to put everything on the line for the Gospel of Jesus Christ?

When you face that kind of decision, which do you choose? The safer one that keeps your faith to yourself, or the riskier one that might cost you something—that might even hurt?

It was a two-lane road with cars coming in the opposite direction, so there was no escape to my left. There was a ditch along the side of the road on my right, so no escape there either. Straight ahead, there was a green Honda Civic stopped behind another car that was waiting to make a left turn at the bottom of the hill. The choice that would cause my car the least damage was probably to just let my car rear-end the Civic since I wasn’t going all that fast.

One problem, however, was that I knew the driver of the car in front of me. I’d been following her from our church to a restaurant to meet people for lunch.

Another problem was that I had a serious crush on the driver. And if that wasn’t enough, I was engaged to be married to her.

So, I chose the ditch.

Sometimes love makes us do things we might not normally do. When we love Jesus, the kinds of things we do tend to change the world.