Think!
July 16, 2007 (Monday) – Last night at 10:00 p.m. in Needles, California, the temperature was 100 degrees. On an average day this time of year the temperature is around 110 and humidity is 12% or 13%. Now that’s what you call “hot and dry.”
When we were on a family vacation about 25 or 30 years ago, we stopped at a roadside park beside the Colorado River at Needles. Our object was to have a picnic lunch. We brought along a loaf of bread, opened it up, and then tried to make a sandwich. (The temperature that day was 115 to 120, and the concrete table so hot we could not set any food items on it.) I’m not kidding you, the climate was so hot and dry the bread got hard and shriveled up before we could get the mayo on it. After a couple of tries, we saw there was no way around it, so each person grabbed the bread and worked as fast as he/she could, and stuffed the shrinking delicacy into the mouth as quickly as possible. Tasted like toast, but harder to chew. Very hard to swallow. Boy, was it hot and dry.
If we had been natives of the area, or if we had researched the locale just a little, we would have known we were attempting the impossible. We were in the Mojave desert, 25,000 hot and dry square miles.
Actually, we should have known better. Five or ten years before, we had descended into Death Valley (also in the Mojave) at around 10 p.m. The temperature at midnight that night was over 100. It took us a long time to get through it, because the car kept overheating, and we had to keep stopping. We made good use of the water in barrels beside the road several times. We came out on the other side into Nevada hours later, wondering why we took that road. Oh, well, live and learn.
Nothing unusual happened to us. We were in the Mojave Desert, and it’s a hot, dry place. We went in with eyes wide open, just uninformed. I’m thinking that many of us do stuff like that in life. We walk right into unpleasant life situations that we could have easily avoided if we had just taken time to think through what we were about to do.
We say later, “I should have known better,” and that helps us the next time we are faced with similar choices. There is no need to blame ourselves, but there is need to inform ourselves. Life is what it is, and we need to take time to make good decisions, exercising common sense.
Oh, well, a dry sandwich or a hot car engine is hardly a major disaster. But we see people every day who have walked right into situations that have resulted in tragedy, with people being hurt in many ways. They could have taken time to think about what they were about to do, and that would have made all the difference in the world for themselves and others.
Signs that read, “Stop. Look. Listen” used to be displayed at railroad tracks on roads all over this land. It was a great sign. Too bad it doesn’t automatically pop up before us before we make important decisions in life. Before you make a decision about the next big thing in your life, think! It may be much more important to your future than you have realized. It may also affect many others. Think!