I was 16 and had only had the Malibu for a few weeks, and I'd just waxed it that day. I made a habit of standing back in the driveway and watching the sunlight bounce off of it. Man and his car. I pulled out of the drive that afternoon heading out to town so everyone could see the car, and I could act like it looked like it did right then all the time.

I was driving along and checking the mirrors and then reached down to turn the radio to a good rock station. What they told me later was that I had rolled side-over-side about four times and end-over-end twice.

I didn’t see the whole ride because I came out of the driver’s door window in the middle of the second side-over-side. I landed on my backside (pardon the pun) and rolled onto my knees and up onto my feet and started walking home. I'm not telling you this in order to share a story of how God had yet again saved my life, although I do give Him all the glory. Instead, I tell you this story so that you can actually find this same kind of 'crash' in your own life. You might have a clean driving record, but it is not to that record to which I am referring. I want you to examine your spiritual record. I want you to look back and see if you can identify the time or date...or maybe even the location...when you took your eyes off the road and crashed.

Consider when or why it was that you stopped checking the mirrors for the one tailing your spirit. Stopped paying attention to the yellow light or dash warnings and decided that 'stop' just meant go at a faster pace.

Hard to say when it happens sometimes, but indeed it does happen pretty often in our spiritual lives doesn’t it? It’s said that most wrecks happen when you're close to home, which suggests to me that it is while we're on the roads we know and at the times we are comfortable that things like this happen to us.

Traveling on the physical or spiritual road to home is where we must be alert. Consider some examples. If you want to hide something, take a grain of sand, for instance. Where would be the best place to hide it? Well, among other grains of sand, of course. Ambushes and attacks can easily come from places that we no longer look but pass every day. Say a man is walking down a dirt road with forest on each side of him. The man would already be alert because he is familiar with neither the road nor the forest around it. Then suppose that the road opens into a clearing. Which would be a better location to surprise the man? I suggest to you that it would be the clearing, because that's where the man would least expect an ambush.

Same here in our spiritual lives. The things that get our attention away from God and His safety are often those things that we do not fear. An immoral television show that we justify watching, a joke we listen to because it’s “harmless.” Gossip we share just because “it’s the truth.”

The point is, a successful thief is one that does not look like a thief. If we can figure that one out, then don’t you suppose one that has been doing it for thousands of years would know this little piece of info? Proverbs 22:3 says that the prudent man forseeth the evil, and hideth himself; but the simple pass on and are punished. Let us pay more attention to where we are headed and why we are headed there. Let’s keep our eyes on the road we are on and always look to the Lord for our direction. We have the best insurance that Heaven has to offer, and Jesus paid the co-pay.