Of floods, football, and watershed moments

                                                                                                                   -- photo Beverly Varnado--

As I write, I’m in sight of a constant plume of water emanating from a hose connected to a crawl space pump at our house. We discovered the flood under the house when smoke seeped upstairs from an overwhelmed sump pump down there. Blessedly, we were at home and could flip the breaker to keep a fire from developing.

Not so great was that Jerry also had pneumonia at the time, which had been diagnosed when he went to see about another health issue.

Between other complications from Jerry’s illness and figuring out how to get the water out from under the house, the big National Championship game with the University of Georgia Bulldogs wasn’t the focus it normally would have been in the days leading up to it. But finally on Monday afternoon, due to the kindness of a friend, we had another pump, and Jerry had been prescribed a new medicine that worked well.

We settled in Monday evening for what turned out to be an historic game and to watch a quarterback, Stetson Bennett, that hardly anyone believed early on could do what he has done. Winning back-to-back national championships is what might be called a watershed moment for the Georgia Bulldog football program. And it is for Bulldog fans as well, especially for those who spent their own blood, sweat, and tears on the field in Sanford Stadium as Jerry did.

According to one source, a watershed moment is a “dividing point, from  which things will never be the same.” The pump burning up under our house could have caused a fire from which our family would have suffered greatly but it did not because by God’s grace, we happened to be here. Jerry’s pneumonia was diagnosed because of another ailment, was caught early, and did not progress as it might have to a more serious stage. And so, we avoided those difficult watershed moments.

But the Bulldogs are getting to live out their amazing watershed moment and go down as those who changed the course of history at UGA.

For many of us, we can point to a line in the sand when things were never the same again in our lives. Some are challenging times. Others are wonderful. My most important one happened on a night decades ago, when I bowed my head before the Lord as water streamed over me in a shower. My life before that event and after it are as different as they possibly could be. It’s almost as if my life began again, as if the water streaming over me washed away all the heartache, sorrow, and sin of my past. But in fact, it was the Lord who did it.

There’s one decision we can make that will for sure be a watershed moment, and that is to surrender our lives totally to the one who gave us life.

The Message renders 2 Corinthians 5:17 this way, “Now we look inside, and what we see is that anyone united with the Messiah gets a fresh start, is created new. The old life is gone; a new life emerges!”

Beyond floods and football, if you’re looking for your own moment of change, now is as good a time as any. It’s never too early or  too late to surrender your life to the Lord. Who knows how history will be changed because you did.

Beverly Varnado is the author of several small town romances from Anaiah Press including her latest, a Christmas novella, A Season for Everything. All are available at Amazon. A memoir, Faith in the Fashion District,  from Crosslink Publishing  is also available as well as her other books, Give My Love to the Chestnut Trees and Home to Currahee. She also has an Etsy Shop, Beverly Varnado Art. 

To explore the web version of One Ringing Bell, please visit bev-oneringingbell.blogspot.com

Beverly Varnado copyright 2022