Falling off the Roof

For years I taught school and worked construction in the summer.  Since I taught at a small Christian school, I usually made more money in the summer than I did during the school year.  But teaching was not a job; it was a calling.  Early on, I did roofing because it was easy.  They say that a roofer is a carpenter with his brains blown out.  In my case, I would agree.  This particular summer in the mid-eighties, I worked on an A-frame house on Signal Mountain, Tennessee.  I would use my high school students as helpers for two reasons.  First, they worked cheap, and secondly, I was their teacher, and they were accustomed to doing whatever I told them to do.  This particular house was three stories with an attic, but the roof came down to the first floor.  The house appeared to be all roof!  I gave Melvin W. a contract price and went to work.  We tore off the old roof section by section dumping the shingles into my old 1953 GMC pick-up truck.  We would tar-paper the section and shingle it right away to stay ahead of rain.  One day, Chris C. was working with me.  We had walk boards across the roof, but one board was separated from the one beside it by about four feet.  I stepped to the end of the walk board, reached out and grabbed a shingle tab to steady myself, and jumped to the next board.  However … the shingle broke and I tumbled down about eight feet into the bed of my truck … with the shingle tab still firmly in my grasp!  When Chris saw that I wasn’t hurt, he began to laugh.  He still reminds me of the day that “Mr. Whitely fell off of the roof”.  Hey, sometimes we put confidence in things that end up letting us down.  It could be people, it could be circumstances, it could be decisions.  But sometimes we fail … or fall.  David wisely said in Psalm 118:8, “It is better to trust in the LORD than to put confidence in man.”  Hey, you may trust someone, like I trusted that shingle, but you will be disappointed.  But remember, the dear Lord will NEVER disappoint you.  Unlike that shingle, Jesus has NEVER let me fall.