Poison in the Air
| The Spirit of God has made
me; the breath of the Almighty gives me life. Job 33:4, NIV. |
It happened
one Sunday when I decided to go scuba diving with my fellow student missionaries,
Matt, Monica, and Julian. We'd been down about 30 minutes to a depth of
60 feet exploring the wall that rises from the ocean floor and eventually
surfaces as the Majuro atoll in the Marshall Islands.
Beginning to feel strange, I motioned
to my buddy, Julian, that I was going up. During the trip up I kept checking
my gauge so I wouldn't surface too quickly and end up with the bends. Then
at about 30 feet I couldn't see my gauge or concentrate. Julian realized
I was in trouble and grabbed my arm. At 10 feet I was breathing extremely
fast and felt I wasn't getting any air. We finally broke surface, and I
spit out my regulator and gasped the fresh air. I inflated my buoyancy
compensator and started to float.
Freaking out, I exclaimed, "I can't
see!" Everything was blurred. I concentrated on Julian's goggles long enough
to finally read the word "tempered" on the glass. I had a headache and
felt light-headed. Julian towed me in to shore, and I just sat there on
the reef while he went to find our friends.
Later, back at our room, Mr. Lane,
the principal, came by and said we shouldn't use our tanks because two
tanks had accidentally gotten filled with carbon monoxide when the compressor
broke. The man filling the tanks switched to another compressor to finish
filling them, not realizing that the tanks held lethal gas. The mistake
was discovered when the guy using the other tank passed out in 20 feet
of water. His dive buddy brought him up, but he was unconscious for four
hours in the hospital. That's when I realized I was lucky to be alive.
And that's when I thought about
how lethal the consequences of a little mistake can be. The broken compressor
nearly killed two people! Sin is like that. It might not be something others
can see or smell, but it can cause death just the same. The fact is, Satan
kills, and "the breath of the Almighty gives me life."
| Don't wait until sin is choking you
to breathe freely from God's Word. It's the only protection against Satan's
poisonous gas! |
|