When unapplied truth suddenly becomes your reality …

When counseling people dealing with Post traumatic Stress Disorder, I help them understand the concept of trauma with a simple example.

The way most of us live our lives is that we’re moving so fast that we fail to — or simply choose to — not “process” a lot of truth we actually know. A simple example is that if we really gave a lot of cognitive awareness to the fact of how dangerous it really is to drive on a freeway with hundreds of two-ton vehicles hurtling themselves just inches away from us at speeds of 65 miles an hour or greater, we would freak out and not want to get in a car.

But instead, we push the thought of such significant danger out of the reach of what we consider to be a possible reality, and so we get in our cars and jump in the middle of the speeding mass.

That is, until one of those other cars clips our car and a crash occurs, with you narrowly escaping with your life. Suddenly, what you always knew — just how dangerous and risky it is to drive on a busy freeway — becomes real rather than theoretical.

The tragic death yesterday of Kobe Bryant, along with his daughter and seven others, has been a sobering experience for many people. Some shaken and stunned people today acknowledge they know what the Bible says about the fragility of life, but like driving on a busy freeway, they keep pushed outside of reality the idea that life could end in a moment, today.

But we do know!

“Look here, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we are going to a certain town and will stay there a year. We will do business there and make a profit.’ How do you know what your life will be like tomorrow? Your life is like the morning fog — it’s here a little while, then it’s gone. What you ought to say is, ‘If the Lord wants us to, we will live and do this or that.’ Otherwise you are boasting about your own pretentious plans, and all such boasting is evil,” James 4:13-16.

Why is it that godly church leaders spend themselves on trying to teach us to develop DAILY disciplines of starting every day with God, walking every day with God, being in the Word every day, and making each and every single day all about Jesus? Because your life, no matter how long, is SHORT and you never know when it will end.

For a brief time after the trauma of something like the sudden death of a towering figure like Kobe, we become more self-aware and other-aware. But for most of us, that doesn’t last long. But for the wise among us, we can use those sobering times to repent and recalibrate our lives so that God reigns supreme in our lives every single day.

Scotty