We all have times when the winds and waves of sorrow or pain or perplexity threaten to swamp us and send the vessels of our lives to the bottom. When those winds howl, we recognize the threat. It’s no fun to ride out a storm. [Marker]

But I’m convinced that it is not always the stormy downpour of pain that capsizes lives; often it is something more akin to the “drip, drip, drip” of a leaky faucet. One incessant drip at a time until the ship is about to go down and the crew hardly saw it coming.

Drip. It’s another medical bill.

Drip. Now it’s the car.

Drip. Here come college costs.

Drip. A job in which you can never say, “I’m done.”

Drip. A drip of a boss who seems impossible to please.

Drip. Nagging thoughts about the direction of your life.

Drip. So many “hats” to wear, and the pressure of trying to do a good job at all of them.

Drip. Too many “yes’s” to too many commitments.

Drip.

            Drip.

                        Drip.

And suddenly, though it really wasn’t sudden at all, the boat is about ready to go down.

Isn’t it the weight of the “drip, drip, drips” that lies at the heart of many “mid-life crises”?

How many of the folks who cut their marriage vows and run into the arms of another do it because they’re really looking for excitement away from the “drips” of their ordinary, everyday lives?

How many people sitting in waiting rooms paying ungodly amounts for tests and pills end up finding that their maladies are stress-related? We find out that we’re not only sick of the “drips,” we’re sick because of them.

What a weight of frustration and anxiety, anger and bitterness, we allow to rise in our lives--until we’re on the way down and we are forced to notice them.

I confess. I’m better at setting up the problem than at providing answers. But a few things I know.

Even Jesus didn’t cleanse every leper in Palestine or open every blind man’s eyes in Jericho.

Even Jesus needed some quiet time away from constant “drip, drip, drips” of the needy people around him. He needed time in the Presence of the Timeless.

Anyone who trades their family’s love and respect for a fling or success is poor and pitiful not matter what their balance sheet says.

There were limits even to what God’s Son tried to do in a day. But there were no limits to His love.