One day when I was a boy, I walked over to the home of my friend, Butch.\u00a0\u00a0I had my dog, Spike on a leash and he walked with me.\u00a0 I knocked on the door, but no one answered.\u00a0 So Spike and I turned around to\u00a0start the half-mile trip back home.\u00a0 We left Butch’s yard and walked back toward the barn where his horses and sheep lived.\u00a0\u00a0There was a place in the back fence where we could get through on our way home.<\/p>\n
Near the barn, we had to go down a narrow lane between two fences.\u00a0 I decided I felt like running, so I started pelting down that dirt lane just as fast as I could go.\u00a0 Spike felt like running too, so he was dragging me down the lane at the end of the leash, making me run faster than I ever could have by myself.\u00a0\u00a0I tell you, my legs were stretching out to their limit!\u00a0 I was yelling at Spike, encouraging him to run even faster so I could go faster, too.\u00a0 I was looking down instead of ahead, watching Spike and my own flying feet.\u00a0 Wow!\u00a0 This was great!<\/p>\n
Suddenly, something hard slammed into my face.\u00a0 My feet flew into the air, the leash slipped out of my hand, and down I went hard on my back– wham!\u00a0\u00a0I lay there in the pasture dirt, looking up in shock at the summer sky.\u00a0 I was so stunned I couldn’t even breathe for a few seconds. What in the world had happened?<\/p>\n
I didn’t feel like getting up or even moving.\u00a0 I hurt all over the back side of my body and I just wanted to lie there in peace for a minute and get my breath back.\u00a0 But Spike didn’t allow that.\u00a0 He was concerned because suddenly I wasn’t following him any more.\u00a0 So he stopped and came trotting back to check on me.\u00a0 Then he started licking me in the face with big, wet slaps.<\/p>\n
I staggered to my feet and saw what had knocked me down.\u00a0 You see, Butch’s family had two pastures where their animals could eat grass.\u00a0 This narrow lane where I was running was the passage between the fields.\u00a0 Whenever Butch wanted to let the sheep go through the lane but not the horses, he laid a big, heavy board through the wire of both fences so it blocked off the lane.\u00a0 The board was high enough for the sheep to go under it, but the horses were taller and they couldn’t get through.\u00a0 I had never paid much attention before, but now I discovered that when the board was up, it was just about the same height as my face.\u00a0 Ouch.<\/p>\n
I think this sort of thing was what Solomon had in mind when he wrote Proverbs 22:3.\u00a0 It says, “A prudent\u00a0man<\/em>\u00a0foreseeth the evil, and hideth himself:\u00a0 but the simple pass on, and are punished.”\u00a0 In other words, a prudent person pays attention to what he’s doing and thinks ahead to avoid problems that may come.\u00a0 I looked up the word prudent in the dictionary, and it means to be wise or cautious.\u00a0\u00a0It means to think about what you’re about to do, and whether doing it may cause trouble.\u00a0 Proverbs 14:15<\/span> says, \u00a0“…a prudent man looketh well to his going.”\u00a0 Well, I surely hadn’t been prudent in running down that lane.\u00a0 I hadn’t looked ahead to see if the board was up–even though I had seen it there many times before!\u00a0 I was too excited about running so fast.<\/p>\n I hope you’re more prudent than I was.\u00a0\u00a0Being prudent means asking if a dog is friendly before trying to pat him.\u00a0 It means making sure you know how deep the water is before jumping in.\u00a0 It means checking to see if your wheels are good and tight before riding your bike down a steep hill.<\/p>\n I wish I had been more prudent\u00a0in Butch’s pasture lane. \u00a0But running into that big board made me more prudent after that day.\u00a0 I never ran into it again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One day when I was a boy, I walked over to the home of my friend, Butch.\u00a0\u00a0I had my dog, Spike on a leash and he walked with me.\u00a0 I knocked on the door, but no one answered.\u00a0 So Spike and I turned around to\u00a0start the half-mile trip back home.\u00a0 We left Butch’s yard and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12848,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[2,4,5,6,7],"class_list":["post-12847","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-character-lessons","tag-character-concepts","tag-character-stories","tag-helping-parents-raise-kids-of-character","tag-kids-blog","tag-uncle-rick-audio-club"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.characterconcepts.com\/unclerick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12847","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.characterconcepts.com\/unclerick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.characterconcepts.com\/unclerick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.characterconcepts.com\/unclerick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.characterconcepts.com\/unclerick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12847"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.characterconcepts.com\/unclerick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12847\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.characterconcepts.com\/unclerick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12848"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.characterconcepts.com\/unclerick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.characterconcepts.com\/unclerick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.characterconcepts.com\/unclerick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}