Hebrews 9: 27 and 28:
Just as a man is destined to die once, and after that to face judgment, so Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many people; and he will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who are waiting for him.
The Last Turn Around
A soft breeze was blowing and I was walking in a grid pattern contouring around the side of a hill. I was inside an old clearcut up Duck Creek checking the flower heads of white spirea plants for mature seeds. Whenever the flower heads showed the coppery tan color of maturity I bent the flowers over and knocked the seeds into a small paper bag, labeled it and GPS’d the site. I was gathering native seeds for a re-vegetation project. I had to note the slope, aspect, and elevation of each 1 acre site. It was slow going. I had left my horse, Chance, at home. He hates going slow. I continued wandering around from patch to patch gathering spirea seeds. Finally I climbed up a steep slope onto the road. It was a small intersection where a grassy two track met an old logging trail.
Lying on the ground face down where the trails met was a sign. It was a temporary sign. Just plywood with a plastic coated sheet of paper stapled to it and attached to a steel fence post. Grass was growing up around it and I would not have noticed it if I had been horseback or in a truck.
I walked over to it and picked it up. I felt instantly chilled. The sign said, “No Turnaround Ahead.”
This is important information! I set the sign back up and tried to pound it down with a rock. No matter how hard I tried it would not go in very far. So I packed rocks around it to keep it upright. It just fell over again when a puff of wind hit it.
I walked up the road a ways and found where it had washed out, about two hundred yards past the sign. If you have ever backed 200 yards on a narrow trail with a steep drop on one side and a steep hill on the other you know how annoying that can be. It is even more irritating when backing a stock trailer.
I thought of the many opportunities Jesus has given most of us to repent, to “turn around.” I heard the Gospel many times before I believed God and was saved. But, we seldom know when the “last turn around” will be. Maybe it will be many years before the end of the road. Maybe it will be tomorrow.
This week we learned of the death of a well known world leader. This man bragged of killing thousands of people. His story is ended, but it did not end with his death, it ended when he missed his last “turn around.”
Our eternal life with Jesus does not begin with our death. It begins when we find our Lord and accept his death on the cross on our behalf. Jesus paid for that infamous world leader, but I am guessing he did not see that sign, in the shape of a cross, lying on the ground.
Don’t miss your last “turn around”.
Diane Johnson