My wife's speedometer lies to her!

Now wait, you say, an inanimate object can't lie. It has no mind, no reasoning power to willfully deceive you. That may be true, but it does indeed tell her false information. When she's going 40 (according to the speedometer) the car's actual speed is closer to 50.

Something must be wrong you might conclude, and indeed you would be right. Obviously something in the system is not behaving itself properly. Let me give you some hints - it's not the doors, car seats, or rear view mirror. It's not even the paint! Sounds funny that I might say that, but let's eliminate the obvious.

It's not the engine, the transmission, or the battery. It's also not the speedometer itself (hmmm, very interesting!) or the speedometer cable that collects the data. It's not even the axle or the rims. It's not the "way" she drives. And it's not the road's fault! What's left? The tires, of course.

Deniese's car has tires that are about 2 inches bigger around than they should be. 1.77 inches, to be very close to exact. Doesn't sound like much, does it? Yet her speedometer thinks the tires are normal sized, so every time they go around she went X inches. But the reality is she went X+more inches. Friends, that adds up pretty fast, because your tires go around a lot when you think about it. To avoid getting a ticket, my wife has to mentally adjust the speed accordingly, roughly two MPH for every ten the speedometer shows. I could have bought her the right size tires (we just got new ones last spring) had I been on the ball and thought about it more, but no I botched it. So for the next 40K miles or until she wears them out she's going to have to play this mental game to stay out of trouble.

You might think nothing's wrong with my wife's car, that it is perfectly drivable the way it is and street legal, etc. That's not true, technically it should be fixed. If someone borrowed her car they might drive it unsafely unless they notice the thing is a little fast or she warns them first.

See how something very small can make such a big difference? It's not a lesson we should take lightly. When something is wrong spiritually with our lives, we have to compensate for it. Let's say we don't study as much as we could. Opportunities come along and we stay silent - we "adjust" ourselves for our lack of knowledge. We hold ourselves back. We might even try to fix ourselves by praying more, getting rid of our TV, throwing out the dice in all our board games. Somehow a big show of Godliness is supposed to be the cure. As strange as this sounds, some do this very thing!

Suppose we do track our issue back to not studying enough. As long as we study "some", there's "technically" nothing wrong with us, right? I dunno about that. We influence others, don't we, who observe the way we "drive" our lives and may want to mimic us. Is a lack of study really such a big deal? And a lack of knowledge is hard to detect if we never open our mouths and defend the faith or teach others! That lack of taking hold of opportunities, no one will ever know you passed up on them. And the lack of zeal you show - zeal is a hard thing to measure anyway, I'm sure it doesn't matter...

Who are we kidding? Not God, but ourselves. All may seem like little things but they sure add up! How does that go, for want of a nail a horse was lost, for want of a horse a battle was lost, etc. You might be just the person to be in just the right situation to bring someone to the Lord, and then fail because you find yourself not "up to speed" on the scripture. Maybe you're someone who only comes for worship service but skips the bible study. Maybe you don't study your bible as much as you should the other 6 days of the week. Those who don't keep up with learning have to "retread" it over and over, getting nowhere.

Randy