Procrastination
a Saturday Story
When I got close to the door, I could read what the sign said. It was one of those signs that the manager told someone to make because he was tired of answering the same question over and over again and then someone grabbed the only scrap of paper they could find, pulled a sharpie from the drawer where all the miscellaneous junk is tossed when no one knows what else to do with it but they can’t bear to throw it away; then that someone wrote hurriedly with uneven lines and sentences that run at an angle with the sinking feeling that they should have planned better because they may not get the whole message on the page, and they aren’t sure they can find another sheet of paper so they make it work and boldly write:
WE ARE ALL OUT OF FAUCET COVERS. SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE.
I immediately understood the problem. The temperatures had dropped to unusually low levels and stayed well below freezing for several days. Folks finally decided frozen pipes are a thing, and a thing they don’t want to experience. So, they headed down to the local hardware store to get faucet covers that should have been installed 60 days earlier, but who’s counting?
I can say, with smug self-righteousness, that I had installed some back in October myself. Now, I must confess that this is the first time in my life I had done so. The reason for my newfound faith in faucet covering is back in August we had a faucet pipe break inside a wall which caused considerable damage to our house, requiring several weeks of work in my spare time to restore it to its previous condition.
Back to the hardware store and the sign and the people who are out of luck and preparing to deal with water damage in their homes as soon as the temperatures warm up enough…It is a common human weakness to put off until it is too late what ought to be done today. We can get away with that pretty often. Often enough that we begin to believe our good luck will never run out. But eventually, it does run out and we have to pay for our negligence.
In some areas of life that is not too big of a deal. But with our spiritual condition, it is a fool's path to put off getting things right with God. Today, the Bible exhorts us, is the day of salvation. Some folks are going to die and come before the Lord only to hear Him say, “Depart from me. I never knew you.” Don’t you be one of them.
