Narrow Escape

January 10, 2009

Reading: Matthew 19-20 and Matthew 7

In the reading today in Matthew, it talks about how we must enter through the narrow gate, because the way to evil is generally this wide open path that is pretty easy to follow. In fact, I can be evil without evil trying. It’s like my place. If I want it to get dirty, all I have to do is nothing. Just go about my day and not clean it.

To clean it is laborious, and therefore is one that I often don’t do. This is my narrow road. Oddly enough, the narrow road ties into the Old Testament reading. It is kind of interesting that when Sodom and Gomorrah is about to be destroyed, the angels tell Lot exactly where to go. In other words, they were telling him what narrow path to take.

I guess Lot wasn’t too big on the escape plan, so what did Lot say? “No, I want to go here. You are like strangling me here with this whole ‘go this way’ trip. I want to broaden my options.”

It would be like at the end of a spy movie, when the villain’s headquarters gets destroyed, and the heroes have to make it out before the gigantic explosion kills everything. Usually there is always that convenient way of escape that the good guys have to take in order to make it out alive.

Imagine that ending, but then the hero says: “No, I don’t want to go that way. You know, there might be a safer way. Let’s figure out where it is and take it.”

“Would you just hurry up! This place is exploding.”

How often has this happened to us, we want salvation and help, but we want it on our terms. However, if I knew that the city I was in was going to be destroyed, I would take the only way out I could. Shoot, you couldn’t get me not to leave.

Or so I say. There have been times that I have sought help, only to find that it did not come in the convenient pill form that I expected it to. Usually it involves a lot of jumping through hoops, and going to areas that I would have preferred to avoid.

Yeah, sometimes that happens when you live the life of a Christian. The only way out of our prison is through a sewer pipe, like Andy DeFrane in Shawshank Redemption. However, you usually end up crawling through “s__t-smelling foulness and come out cleaner on the other side”.