Have you ever assumed something was true or right, then discovered you were mistaken?  I recently had such an experience, and it wasn’t very pleasant.  Some wonderful men from the North Creek Baptist Church spent an entire Saturday re-plumbing our place.  We really needed the work they did, and we appreciated it very much.

    We still had a plumbing need, however, which I couldn’t fix because it involved soldering copper tubing.  One of the men and his son came to help me with it on another Saturday.  I thought it would be simple.  All they had to do was connect some copper tubing to the new water lines.

    The job turned out to be much more difficult than I had thought it would be, but it was finally finished.  Then I opened the faucet in the newly connected area and got a surprise.  Nothing came out!  We were stumped.

    After they left, I did some searching for the cause.  Was I embarrassed when I found it.  We had spent hours hooking up water lines that I assumed went to a certain place, but instead were not connected to anything useful.  I didn’t know as much about the old plumbing layout as I thought I did.  I was certain I was right.  But I was wrong.

    Sometimes we are certain we know the truth about a matter.  Or we may be certain we know God’s will in a certain area.  But we may be wrong because our assumptions are faulty.  We may be ignorant of some of the facts, just as I was ignorant of the plumbing layout at our house.

    When we insist on going full speed ahead without checking things out to see if our basic assumptions are correct, we often end up making a mess of things.  We need to take the time to search for the facts before we commit ourselves to a course of action.  Then we won’t have to go back to correct the mistake we made by acting on false assumptions.