Are We Askew, Too?
Mark 9:38-41
Illustration
by King Duncan

One pastor tells about listening to his father tell a story about a neighbor whose barn had burned down. The entire community gathered to help rebuild it. His father and some other men were told to saw the rafters. They first cut a rafter and then traced around it with a pencil and cut another one. They based the third rafter on the second the fourth on the third and so on. What they didn't take into account was the width of the pencil mark. Each rafter was one pencil mark wider than the one before. After a while, this can add up to quite a difference. By lunch time they looked at the barn and discovered it was going up at a very strange angle because they had deviated from the original standard.  Do you not sense that our barn is a little askew today, too?

ChristianGlobe Networks, Inc., ChristianGlobe Illustrations, by King Duncan