On the way to dropping my kids off at school this morning, I stopped to get gas! I paid $3.37 a gallon – quite a bargain I hear compared to some parts of the country! I didn’t really need gas but I’ve adopted a new view of filling my tank. It hurts less if you only have to fill up a ½ tank.
You see, I’ve always figured that since I pay for my gas with a debit card, I might as well run it out and fill it up once a week or when it’s close to empty. That’s in contrast to my college days when I would only put in about $3 or $4 dollars whenever I absolutely had to (of course gas was just a little over $1 a gallon then). Recently, I filled my tank up from nearly empty and it cost me nearly 70 dollars! We leased our gas-guzzling SUV blazer a few weeks before Katrina hit and I’ve been sorry ever since. Thank goodness our lease is up in a few months – I might be able to resume eating three meals a day!
With my new philosophy though, it is only costing me about $25 to $30 each trip to the pump! That is much easier to swallow! I feel so much better when I leave the gas station…it’s almost the same feeling I had back in the early ‘90s when gas dipped to less than 70 cents a gallon! The problem is when I go to reconcile my checking account, I’m still spending nearly $100 a week for gas! So I’ve just delayed my pain from the pump to the computer desk and Quicken®.
It’s kind of like sin…oh just a little gossip, just a little backbiting. It really doesn’t hurt to flirt with someone who’s not my spouse. It’s just one TV show that I shouldn’t really watch, just one website I shouldn’t open. The problem with that philosophy is no matter how small, it all adds up to a life that is not being lived for Christ – it’s being lived to indulge myself. If I’m not careful, I can really fool myself into thinking that just because it’s people who “know me” I can say those things about someone else or just because no one else is around, I’m not really hurting anyone. Sin is sin is sin and just because I put it in small doses doesn’t make the long-term effect any less harmful.
