A Lesson From The Ice Storm

As I mentioned in last Wednesday’s post our area was hit by an ice storm early last week. In our county we were lucky. There were some areas that experienced several days without power but for the most part things got back to normal over the weekend. What is most notable for me about the effects of the ice storm is the damage done to the trees.

There are limbs and parts of trees down all over the place. Just on our street alone (which is less than ¼ mile long) there has to be at least a dozen trees with major damage. If you drove around the area and didn’t know what had caused the damage you would be convinced that an extremely severe thunderstorm or even a tornado had come through and reeked havoc. But it was all caused by an ice storm.

I thought about the degree of violence that’s part of a tornado or severe thunderstorm verses the lack of violence in an ice storm. The ice came with the calmness of a simple rainfall. Drop by drop it fell onto the trees, wires and utility poles. There was no big surge of precipitation or giant wave of water from the sky. One at a time the drops landed and froze on all surfaces; building up to a degree that the tree limbs could no longer hold the weight of the ice. CRACK! The branches fell, the poles split in half, and the wires came down. Leaving the same devastation as would a violent thunderstorm.

This got me to thinking about how this occurrence in nature parallels the effects of sin on our lives. Generally whenever we as Christians hear about sin from the preacher or read about it in God’s word we think of it as something big like; murder, adultery, stealing, drug abuse, alcoholism or any of the other “big ones” that come to mind when you think of the word “sin.”

But just like the drops of freezing rain that fell on the trees, “small sins” or the ones we habitually commit every day build up on our souls and cause a burden in our lives. They separate us from God and keep us from obeying him and submitting to His will. One day that burden becomes too much to bear and we experience devastating consequences. This doesn’t happen with any quick overtaking of a large storm of sin in our lives. It happens subtlety and in a very deceptive manner. If I may borrow from one of Jesus’ illustrations: we as branches experience a “build up” of sin and the burden causes us to be torn away from the vine.

As I go along in my day to day life I want to turn away from anything that will keep me from being connected to “The Vine”, Jesus Christ. I want to repent and turn away from any “ice storms” of sin. It is my prayer that you too would join me in committing to be vigilant in watching our lives for the build up of “freezing rain” of sin. Turn away from all sin from which we have been redeemed. Let us never take God’s grace for granted by not paying attention to the effects of sin on our lives.