Friday Faithfuls Two: Joel

 Posted by Lisa Laree to Beer Lahai Roi

Our little weekly skim through a book of the Bible to see what verse stands out has brought us to Joel. 

One little interesting tidbit...out of all the posts I did on the desert word study, The one on Joel had more than twice the average views.  It was far and away the most viewed post out of the entire series.  I'm still not sure why...I'm guessing someone shared a link somewhere.  

But today, reading through, I pondered two or three scriptures but when I hit the fourteenth verse of chapter three, I knew I'd found the verse for this week:

Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision! For the day of the LORD is near in the valley of decision.

And the thing is...so many folks walking through that valley have NO IDEA that it is a critical life point.  A character in a play I wrote years ago (that has been performed exactly one time, lol, and I didn't even see it), when asked how she became the hardened, cynical person that she was, replied, "What makes anybody into anything?  A small decision here, a chance taken there – it all seems insignificant at the time, but it adds up. Before you know it, you find yourself somewhere in life and you don’t even know how you got there."

We generally don't know the impact of the seemingly small decisions we make...or how those tiny course deviations will have played out years down the road.  David had no idea what horrors would follow his small decision to stay behind in Jerusalem whilst Joab led the army out in the spring.  Achan didn't know what he started when he stopped to take a long look at some of the plunder in Jericho.   Ananias and Saphira certainly didn't think it was a big deal to lead everyone to believe they had given ALL the money they got for selling a piece of property.

Small decisions can have big consequences.  Bigger than we are willing to admit.