Preoccupation

May 4

Are you among the horrified drivers who have been negotiating through traffic and suddenly noticed someone piloting the car beside you while talking on a cell phone? Or, worse yet, while ‘texting’! This certainly doesn’t instill confidence in the notion that drivers are focused on the task of obeying traffic signs or navigating through traffic!

How can anyone be in control of a 2000 pound vehicle when his eyes are on a small, hand-held device and his mind and fingers are endeavoring to compose an intelligible message to someone? If your doctor were focused on the current stock report while examining you, you’d feel you were getting the shaft from a paid professional.

When a driver is focused on anything other than the responsibility of maneuvering his vehicle safely, he is giving short shrift to other drivers, to their passengers, and to their families who will be devastated when their unfocused attention does its awful work. When a driver is too busy to execute his driving responsibilities safely, he is risking not only his own life but the lives of everyone sharing the highway with him. Just as driving responsibly is a life and death issue, so is navigating through the pit-falls the enemy of your soul endeavors to use to trip you up spiritually.

Jesus Himself said in Matthew 26:41, “Watch and pray so you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.” We must ever be on guard against the snares of the evil one, for he, “…goes about seeking whom he may devour” I Peter 5:8. How better to destroy a man—physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually—than to use his preoccupation with sin, with the cares of life, even with social media to take his life and the lives of others around him who are in the proverbial ‘wrong place at the wrong time’!