LONG STORY, SHORT. My neighbor has a sinkhole in his backyard caused by the failure of a culvert buried nine feet down, the culvert that carries water from the drains in our street. Needless to say, there was a lot of water in our street during Sunday night’s storm!
Monday a group of us tackled the task of digging a nine-foot deep hole. We accomplished the digging and there found a concrete culvert (placed circa 1947) separated from the rest and filled with dirt. With the culprit culvert below us we set to work to make things right, and by late afternoon it was repaired, just in time for Monday night’s rain!
Besides the soreness which comes from hours of digging and slopping around in cold mud, there was another lesson I learned, and it is this: Once you find the broken pipe it does very little good to talk about all the reasons this “could have happened.” None of us would ever know, the blasted pipe had been nine feet down for almost 60 years! What we could do was get to the task of fixing the break and making it functional again. And with the crew I was honored to work with, I would say it’s better than new.
Our spiritual life can sometimes be like that sinkhole. We can see a problem, and then endeavor to uncover the cause and once we do we stand there talking about all the things, from the past, that could caused the problem, instead of just getting down to fixing the brokenness.
I am reminded of the encounter Jesus had with the woman caught in adultery. He did focus upon all the things that brought her to that point, but rather He spoke non-condemning truth and told her to sin no more.(John 8 )
So, are you facing some sinkhole or culvert catastrophe in your life? Maybe it’s time to grab some help and dig in and with God’s gracious help, be restored to use. Why wait until the next storm?