Patching a Slow Leak

For a long time now, my bike's front tire has had a slow leak. For most of that time, I just tolerated it. It wasn't too awfully annoying to have to pump my tire full of air each morning. In fact, thinking back on that, I could have blogged about it, with the message being something about having to stop to repent or regain our spiritual strength periodically in order to proceed in our mortal journeys. However, given the cause of the leak and how easy it was to fix the leak (hopefully) permanently, that may be a bad analogy.

The leak had been caused by a small thorn - a tiny thing no longer than half the width of a pinkie fingernail. I had seen it in my tire some days ago, but I knew better than to pull it out right there on the road, and since then, I had always felt too tired or busy to deal with it. I knew the thorn was there, but it didn't annoy me enough to prompt me to do anything about it.

The longer I ignored the thorn, the more annoying it became. Soon, it wasn't enough to just pump up the tire every morning; I had to pump it up again each afternoon as well. Riding home from school, the "slow" leak was so bad that I had to pump it up again halfway home. (Thank goodness for portable bike pumps!)

When I got home, I decided that I couldn't ignore my tire's slow leak any longer. I removed the thorn, patched the tire, and filled the tire with air again. That was a few hours ago, and the tire is still holding air. The slow leak has been fixed. With any luck, I won't have to reinflate the tire again tomorrow morning, or for quite some time after that. After weeks of just living with the problem, I finally got around to solving it, and it really only took about an hour, if that, to truly solve it.

I think the analogy here is that we shouldn't let small problems fester. Problems tend to grow with time, and even if they don't, we really don't want to have to spend time periodically dealing with the symptoms of the problem without addressing the problem itself. If we know our tires have slow leaks, we should patch them up rather than continually reinflating them. Yes, dealing with the problem itself takes more time and effort, and sometimes we don't have the time or energy to solve a problem at a particular time, and the wisest (or only) course of action at that time is to deal with the problem as well as we can and make a mental note to solve the problem later. But the thing is that we are probably going to have to solve the problem sooner or later, and the sooner we get around to solving the problem, the sooner the problem will be solved.

We shouldn't procrastinate repentance the way I procrastinated fixing my bike's tire's slow leak. I know that we only have so much spiritual energy and that we have SO many sins to repent of, but we shouldn't let our inability to repent of all our sins prevent us from even trying to repent of any of them. We can work on one sin, for starters, and when we've completely overcome that one (or whenever we feel ready, whichever comes first) we can move on to the next one. We owe it to ourselves to try to make some progress on this eternal, perfecting project. Every day we choose to live with having spiritual problem is another day that we go without the spiritual blessings we'll get for solving it. We spend so much time and energy dealing with problems that we wouldn't have, or wouldn't be as bad, if we repented. We eventually get to the point where repenting is less difficult and less time-consuming than dealing with the continual consequences of not repenting.

Sure, we could keep pumping air into our tires again and again every day, but it might be wiser to take the time out of one day in order to patch the slow leak for good.