We have a beautiful sign at our church.  It stands by the highway, letting everyone who happens to drive by and look know that a church, a gathering of people who are trying to follow in the footsteps of Jesus, meets here.  It is welcoming and inviting, and I am glad it is there.  We’ll get back to this later.  For now -

It was pretty late already that night, and it was way past time for my little boy to be in bed.  Actually, it was probably past my bedtime too.  But, the process of getting him to bed comes first.  Almost the last thing we do before “lights out” is brush his teeth.  Mom does the actual brushing [and singing!], but it’s my job to get the toothbrush ready.  Of course, that means getting a little bit of water on the toothbrush.

And when I turned the handle on the sink, that’s exactly what happened – only a little bit of water came dripping out of the faucet.  Turning the handle even more didn’t help.  Sure, there was enough in those little drips to complete the task at hand.  But there was not enough for anything else. 

And just like that, we became very much like a family of nomads living in the desert.  Finding water – for washing hands, for brushing teeth, for taking a bath, for cooking, and yes, for drinking – became our single, top-most priority.  Wasting water became nearly a crime.  And taking a leisurely hot shower?  Forget about it! 

Once again, I was confronted with the reality that there is a very thin line between the elegance of living in an advanced culture and civilization in which the necessities of life are so abundant that we rarely give such things a second thought, and living in places in which the only thought each day is to somehow find enough of the necessities of life to keep body and soul together for one more day – which pretty much describes the daily life of wild animals.  We really aren’t very different from the wild animals.  Take away our water, or our electricity, or our gasoline, and even civilized people will quickly become desperate.  They [we] might even start behaving like animals.  

Anyway, getting back to the story, we all slept through the night, and woke up the next day to find – Hallelujah! – the water was running again.  Everything was back to normal.  Or so we thought until I headed out to work.  That was when I saw that a sign had been placed on the side of the road by someone from the Company that provides water to all of the homes in our subdivision.  It wasn’t a big sign – it could easily have been missed by someone who was even slightly distracted, or looking the other way at that moment. 

Yet this little sign communicated news that was important to anyone living in this subdivision.  The sign said that there had been a brief loss of pressure in the water lines the night before – which explained our experience of having no running water in our house late the night before.

But the sign had more to say.  The loss of pressure meant that the water might now be contaminated with some kind of bacteria.  Therefore, if you wanted to stay alive and healthy, the sign said that you had to boil the water coming out of your faucets for at least a full minute before it would be safe to consume.

I happened to notice the sign, and then I slowed down enough to actually read what it said.  And when I did - back home I went as fast as I could to pass on the news.  Fortunately for us, none of us had actually consumed any water that morning.  We were safe, and now we knew what one must do to be saved.  And we were thankful for the warning.

However, as my wife pointed out, we might have been the only people in the subdivision who were awake late enough the night before to notice the water pressure problem; and we just happened to neither use nor consume any of the contaminated water the next morning before we learned of the potentially dangerous problem.  We were lucky.

But our neighbors were not so lucky.  When they went to bed the night before, there was no problem with the water pressure.  And when they woke up, the water was working as usual.  Thus, they had no reason to suspect that any of the water they drank, or used to make coffee, could have been contaminated with a dangerous bacteria.  And they wouldn’t know about this unless they happened to encounter the sign – long after they had consumed the contaminated water.  That sign was too little, too late to help the vast majority of the people in our subdivision.  Surely The Water Company could, and should have done more to get the message out.  Just putting up a sign was not enough.

Some of you, like me, were born into a family in which The Lord is honored, a family in which the story of The Lord’s relentless search to find His wandering children and bring them home to Him is told and re-told, a family in which devotion to The Lord and to a congregation of His People is engrained into each member of the family practically from birth.  We were lucky. 

But think of the people you know who were not so fortunate as to be a part of such a family.  These people may not know, they may never have heard of the wonderful blessings that arise from being a part of the Family of God, they may never have been warned of the danger they face from not being a part of The Family of God.  Who is going to get the message out to them, who is going to tell them, who is going to warn them, who is going to even beg them [as The Apostle Paul did in 2 Corinthians 5:20] to be reconciled to God?

Tough questions indeed.  But here is what I think I have learned  – just putting up a sign is not enough.     

Ambrose Ramsey | Shepherd