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| -- 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