Sandbagging and the Still Small Voice

Have you seen this video? 

If you’re the type who doesn’t like to click on videos, I’ll summarize.

It’s about a man who lives smack dab in the middle of the Mississippi floods.  Faced with two choices, fight or flight, he decided to stick around and take a stand for his house.  He did it by building a moat around his property and then sandbagging the moat.

Very cool.

I’m not really sure of the engineering of the whole thing. There’s never been a lot of activity on that left side of my brain, after all.  All I know is that as of the time of the filming, his house was standing, in the midst of all that flooding, on solid ground.

I saw that video on Saturday night, and I couldn’t get it off my mind. To say that I was impressed was an understatement. I was impressed with his courage. I was impressed with the folks working beside him.  More than anything, I was impressed with their tenacity.  Even as the video was being shot, boat loads of sandbags were arriving still.

It wasn’t enough to surround the house. They were determined to keep on sandbagging as long as absolutely necessary. 

Even though I live hundreds of miles from the mighty Mississippi, I relate to that man. My house is just standing in a flood path of a different sort. It’s a moral and cultural swell that looms all around me, threatening to sweep my house away in its snake- infested muddy waters.  

And just like that man, I have two choices, fight or flight.  

It probably won’t surprise you that I tend to gravitate toward the flight option. It’s my nature to rush off to some moral high ground and barricade my clan away from the world.  I sent my daughters to Christian school and obsessively monitored their friendships and pastimes.  I surrounded them with prayer breakfasts, and youth groups, and all sorts of churchiness.

But there’s one big difference between a cultural flood and a literal one. Cultural flood waters never recede. They just keep rising. The flight option doesn’t work so well.

You had better learn how to sandbag.

I was still thinking about this yesterday morning when our youth pastor stood to give his sermon, and in one of those Holy Coincidences, he finished what God had started.   Oh, he might not have used the term sandbagging, but he spoke of it nonetheless. He drew his sermon from  Deuteronomy 6:4-9.

Hear, O Israel: 

The LORD our God, the LORD is one. 

Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.

 These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts.

  Impress them on your children.

 Talk about them when you sit at home

 and when you walk along the road,

 when you lie down and when you get up. 

Tie them as symbols on your hands 

and bind them on your foreheads.

 Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates...

Sandbagging.

I like to think that we’ve done a lot of sandbagging over the years. God knows that these energizer bunnies have tried. Honestly?  I 'd like to think all that yakking has left us sitting pretty behind a moat, beyond the sandbags.                                                                     

But we aren’t.

The flood waters are muddier than ever and even closer to the property line. I can see them from where I stand, and frankly, Satan has tried his best to give me a spirit of fear.

But God has given me a man in Arkansas.  

And then he gave me a wonderful young pastor to remind me that the book of Deuteronomy is not the telling of the law; it's the retelling. It 's the first of many reminders that  as long as we have breath, we have sand bags to fill.  

And that's what I heard from the still small voice this weekend.

How about you? 

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