Chaplain Bill Wolfe
Llano County Sheriff's Department
Hi and welcome once again to the Chaplain's Corner. It's June already.time to think about fishing and swimming. Around here a lot of folks head out to the "slab" for both. It's a good place to get sunburned or a citation for driving in the river bed.
I guess the first thing I need to do is to describe "Scott's Slab" on the Llano River. Basically it's "good ole country river crossing" - a narrow strip (read one lane) of concrete probably ¼ mile long laid on the solid granite of the river bed - that runs north-south across the Llano River about 10 miles west of town and is part of County Road 102. Until recently the north end of the "slab" was comprised of a series of large rectangular concrete culverts where the concrete roadway formed the top of the culverts. This is where the main channel of the river runs.
Most of the year the river runs in the channel at the north end of the slab, and in the late summer it may only run 6 inches or so deep and well below the road level. But get a good batch of thunderstorms like we had yesterday evening and night - well, the river comes up and over the slab in at least 3 places. Sometimes the slab is partially covered, and sometimes the river is way up and the crossing will be invisible and unusable for days on end.
Early this year the Texas Dept. of Transportation (TxDOT), in their infinite wisdom, decided to tear out the culverts at the north end of the slab and replace the large rectangular culverts with multiple smaller round culverts that supposedly will carry the same volume of water. (What they will do is plug up more easily.) They didn't bother to improve the rest of the slab.
So, when the construction was going on and I was on duty, I'd drive out and play "tourist" and watch the progress. On one of these days I noticed some illustrations right there in front of me.
The first was that the river was sort of like life in general. Life flows by - the sun keeps coming up and we get a day older - and we can't do a thing to stop it. Life has its highs and lows just like the river; sometimes it's slow and lazy, and other times it's wild and crazy - and when it's wild, you just have to hang on to something until it slows down.
The slab, then, is sort of like our personal day-to-day lives. When the flow of the river of life is low and slow, we stay on top of things and we think, "Life is good." Then suddenly a storm hits, and the river comes up. Sometimes we manage to stay above things, but when the flow is too high, we go under. If we don't have a good grasp on something solid, we can wash out. Sometimes the water of life is over our heads for just a short time, and other times it seems like we'll not be able to hang on until it recedes.
As I sat and thought about what seemed to me a dumb redesign of the culverts, I thought about how easy it is to re-engineer parts of our lives and not do a smart job of it. For example: how many of you have friends who've gotten divorced more than once for the same reason? Perhaps they've not tackled the real problem. It's often more time consuming and labor intensive to look at the proverbial big picture to see where the problems actually lie and make a better redesign. We tend to focus on the immediate problem and not think through what will happen if we make that change. (I had similar experiences as a computer programmer.)
One thing that happened on the rebuild of the culverts was that it changed the channel dynamics and caused the water to now flow over a once dry part of the roadway. The slab doesn't go straight across the river bed. Just on the south side of the new construction, the roadway makes a jag, sort of a short, angular S-curve, and there's a 6-inch drop-off on the west side. The redirected water goes over this short piece of road, and when the water rises a little and gets muddy, you can't see the jag or where to drive safely.
Somebody once said something about not fixing something that wasn't broken. That's what's referred to as "man's wisdom." That's why when we look at redesigning our lives, we should consult God. God is the Master Designer who always can see the big picture. He can evaluate more "what if's" than you can imagine faster than the fastest super-computer and come out with the right plan. We just have to be willing to find out what the plan is and be willing to fix that part that needs fixing.
So the over-simplified moral of the story is that if we allow God to design our river crossing and then build it on the solid bedrock of His Word, the proverbial water may go over us occasionally, but it won't wash us out. (Check out Jesus' version of the same idea in Matthew 7:24-27.)
Until next month then: Blessings to you and yours.
Chaplain Bill
llanochaps@moment.net
