[Steve Myers] One summer day when I was a kid, my friend broke his ankle. You know how it happened? We got to the pool and we decided we were just gonna go for it. So both of us ran to the pool and we jumped in the deep end, or so we thought. It was the shallow end, the water was about two and a half feet deep, and somehow I came out okay, but my friend, boom, hit the bottom immediately and broke his ankle.

Now, if we would have waited and noticed which end of the pool we were on, we could have avoided that painful time that my friend. He recovered. It was okay, but for weeks on end, he babied that ankle. It was in a cast and the whole thing, and it was a difficult time, especially as kids in the summertime, you want to get out there and play all the time. And if we would have waited, if we would have just waited and thought about it for a moment, we would have realized, "Oh, yeah, we're on the wrong end of the pool."

Have you ever done that in other situations in your life, jump into a situation before really thinking about it? There's a scripture in Lamentations. Not a book we often turn to, but in Lamentations 3:25, it gives advice, well, maybe about jumping in pools, but even more than that, for life overall. Here's what it says. It says, "The Lord is good to those who wait. They wait for Him." You know, if we would have waited and looked where we were, we would have been a lot better off.

Then he goes on and says, "It's good that one should hope and wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord." And oftentimes in life, we may face a situation, we don't know what to do, and maybe we jump into things before we really think about it and wait and look to God. You ever been in a situation like that? Something has happened, you take action, and then after the fact, you say, "You know, I should have prayed about that. I should have petitioned God about that before jumping into the pool."

And so it's an important lesson to learn about looking to God. In fact, in a way, He's saying, "Listen to me. Listen to me. Come to me. Don't just jump in. Hang on, wait, and listen to me." So this lesson about listening becomes critical when it comes to choosing to do God's will. Listen to God. And in fact, if you turn things around a little bit, the same letters in 'listen', when you turn them around a little bit can also spell 'silent'. 

You know, do we silently petition God instead of just jumping in, getting carried away and getting hurt? Do we step back, wait on God, look to Him, ask Him for His direction in our life, and silently petition Him and meditate on His way so that we can take the best action for our life? Before you jump into the pool, maybe you could think of Lamentations 3 and wait on God and petition Him.

That's BT Daily. We'll see you next time.