This last Monday I left with my boat in tow headed for the Brownlee Reservoir for some catfish fishing. I haven’t written a blog for the last five days because there was no electricity to charge my IPad and there was no cell service where we were camping.

I have this very nice 26-foot fiberglass boat that I built with a 135hp Mercury outboard motor on it that I was dying to use. I had recently done a bunch of work on the boat and I had the outboard motor completely rebuilt. I couldn’t wait to get it into the water and see how fast it was going to go and catch a bunch of fish out of it.

I had left the key on after I used the electric tilt to raise the motor to drive over to Huntington so the next morning the battery was dead. I had brought along two spare batteries so I put one of them in the boat. I don’t know how or why, but I put the new battery in backward from the one I took out. When I tried to start the motor it wouldn’t start. It had always started right off before so I looked again at the battery and immediately saw my mistake. I turned it around and tried to start it, but evidently, I had messed something up or several things. I couldn’t believe that I did that!! I said to myself out loud, “Duke, you dumbhead, why did you do that!!! Have you ever done something totally stupid and wish that you could keep anybody else from finding out about it.

Just about everybody has done something like that. Putting a battery in backward has consequences, but it isn’t what you would call a sin, just a mistake. I try hard not to make mistakes, especially ones that have a financial cost involved in the consequence. But sin on the other hand is more than making a mistake, it is choosing to break God’s law. Learning and growing in knowledge and wisdom will cut down on the mistakes that we make, and growing in holiness will reduce the sins that we commit. Life is all about growing in wisdom and knowledge but it is especially about growing in holiness and the character of Jesus.

Learning happens at the point of mistakes, poor choices, and sin, but it requires that we own our blunders, review them a bit to recognize where we took the wrong turn and then to make resolve not to do that again. We may do the same thing again but the distance between them grows farther and farther apart.