Pitfall

Proverbs 14:8 -- "The wisdom of the prudent is to give thought to their ways, but the folly of fools is deception."

There is just something about the tinny sounding bleeps and pops of an old Atari video game.  Familiar is the feel of the awkward "joy stick" and the less than smooth movements of my chunky and pixilated digital character as he dodges alligators and giant wholes in the ground. No doubt about it - the game Pitfall brings back some wonderful memories. 

An iconic platform game, it really paid to know where you were going and to keep one eye on the path ahead. In fact, once you played through several times the goal stopped being about how to get through the levels and more about beating your own fastest score. All you had to do was memorize where the "pitfalls" were, and take the appropriate action when faced with one of them. Miss one? No worries, just start over and play through again. It was a hoot! I remember well my sister, Paul Latham, and I - all packed in around his Atari waiting to take over the controls when one of us fell into one of those nasty pits. [death marked the end of our turn]. Reluctantly, we would hand the joy stick over and secretly hope that our beloved friend/sister fell to their demise quickly.

Unfortunately, life does not imitate art in this case. When we hit a pitfall, we don't get to start over and avoid the trouble next time around. Nothing proves this better than the times in which we are now living. 

Roaming through our old neighborhood provides a gloomy snap-shot of empty houses in various states of decay. Run down yards where children once laughed and played and boarded up windows through which light once glowed pepper the landscape in frequent clusters. In many cases, the earth has begun to reclaim the once vibrant lot, and weeds and vines now cling to front doors and vinyl siding. In other cases, the roof is caving in and racoons have chewed holes in the structure to claim it as their own. It breaks the heart. Especially when one considers that the housing bubble that went "POP" so very loudly could have been avoided [and actually WAS by those who paid attention].

Proverbs 14:8 gives us a warning in this regard - it pays to pay attention. Not only do we need to keep one eye on the path before us - but it's important that we learn from our own pitfalls. No one could have predicted the closing of Cecil Field - a military base whose personnel flocked to our old neighborhood in droves for peaceful off-base living. But each of us could have been better prepared for the fall when it happened. Some were. Some weren't. The people that were caught by surprise when the housing market crashed were forced to leave their homes and move on to greener, more manageable pastures. 

This is only one small example of keeping an eye out for tomorrow. Currently our nation's map is dotted with stories like these that number in the tens of thousands. Proverbs 14:8 reminds us that it never pays to be caught off guard. 

Back to younger years with an Atari joy stick in my hands, I remember that if I was a well-prepared explorer, I could avoid some of the traps set out to trick my character to his early demise. Wanting to stretch out my turn, I learned quickly that it paid to pay attention. It paid to have the right tools and the wisdom to apply them correctly in each situation. God has graced us with this very same opportunity. He has provided the tools we need to avoid pitfalls and randomly placed traps. He can see the road ahead where we cannot.  It behooves us to keep our eyes focused on Him, that He can guide us through without mishap. When we DO mis-step [and let's face it, we ALL do], God gives us grace, that we might learn from our mistakes and not make the same one twice. 

After all, isn't the definition of insanity described by doing the same thing over and over again expecting the end result to change? If that isn't a fool's deception, I don't know what is.