Weekend Thought: Because you can't just sit there

Larry Walters was a 33-year-old man, who went to the local army surplus store one morning and bought forty-five used weather balloons.
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That afternoon he strapped himself into a chair, to which his friends tied the helium-filled balloons. He took along a six-pack of beer, a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, and a gun, figuring he could shoot the balloons one at a time when he was ready to land.

Walters, who assumed the balloons would lift him about 100 feet in the air, was caught off guard when the chair soared more than 11,000 feet into the sky - smack into the middle of the air traffic pattern at Los Angeles International Airport. Too frightened to shoot any of the balloons, he stayed airborne for more than two hours, forcing the airport to shut down its runways for much of the afternoon, causing long delays in flights from across the country.

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Soon after he was safely grounded and arrested by the police, reporters asked him three questions: ‘Were you scared?’ ‘Yes’. ‘Would you do it again?’ ‘No.’ ‘Why did you do it?’ And I love this response - he said, ‘Because you can’t just sit there, can you?’

Now, what Larry Walters did was a stupid thing to do but I wish more Christians had the attitude that we need to do something – ‘because you can’t just sit there!’

We need to strive for a balance. There are some people who spend all their time studying, learning, creating an argument against every false doctrine. Yet, they never get around to ‘doing.’

There are others who are busy doing good works, but they haven’t spent enough time with God’s word to know if they’re really following his will. God’s desire is that we have both knowledge and active care for others.