I wish I could have taken a picture of it.  You wouldn’t have believed what I was seeing.  I was driving home yesterday, taking the backwoodsy route instead of the highway.  I made the turn onto that backwoodsy road and almost immediately came upon a young man riding a motor scooter.  I noticed right away that the rider was sitting kind of cock-eyed; almost side-saddle.  He seemed to be struggling to keep his balance.  “Weird”, I thought.  And because of his painfully slow rate of speed and the length of that backwoods road, I had plenty of time to figure out exactly why he was struggling.

Soon after noticing his posture and awkward lean, I noticed the cause of it.  I looked down at the two wheels of his scooter and something was obviously wrong with the scooter’s frame.  The two wheels were literally leaning in opposite directions.  It was the strangest guy-on-a-scooter thing I’d ever seen.  Clearly, this rider was trying his best to drive a motor scooter that simply wanted to drive away from itself.

I’ve recently heard people quote Abraham Lincoln when he said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”  Unfortunately they don’t seem to realize that Abraham Lincoln was actually quoting Jesus and not the other way around.  (Matthew 12:25)

Jesus was speaking to those who were accusing Him of casting out demons in the name of Beelzebul, the prince of demons.  What kind of sense would that make?  Like it or not, Jesus just caught the religious uppity-ups talking nonsense.

I had a great chat last night with my kids around the dinner table.  We were discussing why it is (as young people who love Jesus) they don’t get involved in the way many other kids at school talk, just for example.  Specifically, why weren’t they getting involved in the gossip, the slander, and the profanity–all of which they hear around them on a non-stop basis?  Why not give up and jump in?

Their answers were clear and filled with conviction, but what I liked most was their simplicity.  In essence, they could see just how broken that path was and they wanted no part of it.  They were saying that they’d made their decision and while swimming through their everyday life in public school was/is anything but a picnic, their decision to steer clear of a one-foot-in-and-one-foot-out approach to following Jesus is holding strong.

Because even though they are young, they’ve already seen that a house divided (in this case, a half-committed follower of Jesus) is a miserable existence.  They are by no means perfect, just as their dad isn’t perfect.  But they are clear on their decision.  And for that I’m so thankful.