I was talking to a bus driver friend of mine who related to me about a tension-filled couple of minutes in Pittsburgh while he was driving his bus. He was telling how he was coming across the Roberto Clemente bridge, side by side with a big rig to his left. Coming to a traffic light there was an accident up ahead. This forced both the bus and the truck to slide over to the right to avoid oncoming traffic which was cheating by coming across the truck and bus lanes to also avoid the accident. Well the driver told me when he moved over to avoid either a close call or an accident the bus mirror hit the main post on the bridge and - "Bam!" the mirror was gone. The driver was telling me he couldn't understand how he could hit the mirror on the bridge in the first place so they went back to the scene to find that the bridge actually left little room for bus, truck or big rigs. The posts were too close to the road, thus the mirrors would hit the bridge. The bridge beams had the markings to prove it was done regularly and often.
So what we had were responsible drivers caught in a bad situation because the bridge itself was not really built properly for todays vehicles.
I got to thinking how much life was similar to the close call for that bus. How many times have we, as human beings, come too close to something. We're doing regular life, we're not up to something wrong or troublesome but then, "Bam!" a temptation, a sexual sin, a vulgar moment, a time when something bad is easy and is there right in front of us. But where did it come from, and what course of action would you take? Would you go with it or deflect it? Would it be a close call where you just hit a mirror or would you have a full collision?
There are many factors and all of them are waiting for your response. How many near misses have we had in life when we were not doing anything wrong or looking for trouble, like the bus driver moving over just a little to avoid a potentially bad situation and "Bam!" he hits something that shouldn't be there. We are going about our careers, negotiating life in the corporate world, or daily punching the time clock and, "Bam!" there in front of us is a close encounter with an inter-office relationship, or a chance to embezzle some money or maybe an opportunity to fix someone's wagon who has hurt us on the job. That's when it hits us that we have come too close to a very bad human experience. It hit our mirror because we felt the encounter, we didn't have a full blown collision but when we sit back and think about it, it was a really close call.
Ps 84:11-12; For the LORD God is a sun and shield: the LORD will give grace and glory: no good thing will he withhold from them that walk uprightly. O LORD of hosts, blessed is the man that trusteth in Thee. (KJV)
