A few years ago lightning struck our house. It seems most of the energy was safely dissipated via a ground wire, as intended.
Yet some took a variant path, following along the eave trough and blowing the downspout away from the house, before jumping to an unused underground cable and heading towards our prized maple tree.
The telltale sign of the end of its path was mound of dirt over where the wire once was. The height and width of this trail diminished as it approached the tree, disappearing a few feet from the trunk.
I expected the leaves to turn brown in a couple of days. I braced myself to watch my tree die. To my relief, this didn’t happen. The tree lived the rest of that year and all through the next.
A year and a half later, just as the leaves began to unfold in the spring, they stopped growing and turned brown. Within a couple days, my maple tree was dead.
The likely explanation was the lightning damaged the root system enough to where the tree couldn’t recover.
Above the ground, the tree looked healthy and alive. Yet, hidden from view was a tree fighting for survival. Though it hung on for eighteen months, it couldn’t recover.
Such it is with life. Every action has ramifications. Yet if the effects are delayed, we can easily assume everything is fine.
With an unwise action, the lack of an immediate consequence can lull us into assuming everything is all right and embolden us to repeat our reckless behavior.
On the outside, everything may look fine. But what no one can see—what we may not even realize—is that on the inside we are wounded and moving towards death, be it literal or figurative.
We need to do what is good, even when we see no benefits from our wise actions or no consequences because of our unwise acts: we never know what may await
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Peter DeHaan writes about biblical Christianity to confront status quo religion and live a life that matters. He seeks a fresh approach to following Jesus through the lens of Scripture, without the baggage of made-up traditions and meaningless practices.
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