Beware the Stealthy Fog

A light fog blanketing the landscape can be calming to the soul. Sitting on my back porch, for instance, talking to the Good Lord while the early morning is trying to slip out of its thin pale robe. That’s a nice prescription for peace.

There are other times when fog is less appreciated, say when you’re driving, or how about when it begins to roll up from the floorboards of an airplane cabin as you’re flying through the friendly skies with a group of polite strangers? That’s not so relaxing. But, that’s exactly where I found myself a couple years ago.

I remember how uncomfortable my fellow travelers and I were at the onset of the mist and I remember how our pilot’s cheerful announcement over the PA did little to alleviate our growing apprehension, not when he told us it was “nothing to be concerned about”, not when he explained the small “incidental wiring issue” behind it. We were eager to settle down, just as soon as we got our feet on the ground. In the end, the fog of smoke dissipated as slowly as it had arrived and we landed without incident.

“Don’t worry, be happy” may have worked that day but you and I would be foolhardy to adopt it as a blanket prescription against all early warning signs and especially not the internal God-given monitor of our conscience. The snare that trips us up in the walk of faith is rarely the obvious one.

Sin is stealthy and apathy, why, apathy rolls in as silently and insidiously as a fog. Our inner warning system goes off when we first start choosing other activities over church, when we quit praying quite as often and open our Bibles even less. But it grows fainter over time. The less attention we pay to the growing fog of apathy, the more it builds until we can’t see the forest for the trees and we can’t find the way back home to Jesus if our lives depended on it. And they do.

Hugs, Shellie