smoke signals

this morning I was rudely awoken to the sound of my smoke alarm... first thing I did was look at the time.... 6:55 a.m. I'd only been in bed for about 4 hours... I took a deep breath and smelled something smokey....
"oh no! my house is on fire!!!"
I jump out of bed and almost collide with my mom as she heads down the hall to the smoke alarm (it's right outside both our bedrooms) she started fanning the alarm and I started walking around: touching things to see if they were hot... smelling for smoke...
there was no smoke in our apartment... but I went to the open window (our apartment gets REALLY warm, so we leave a window open almost 24/7) I smelled outside and nothing was smokey there... so I went to our door... first I touched it (like I was always taught) then I looked out the peephole... nothing... just calm apartment hallway...
so I then repeated what I had just done with our storage room door... again nothing...
I was pacing around our apartment... and as I got closer to the bedrooms I could smell more smoke... my mom was in her room and she pulled her bed away from the wall to find out that...

somehow in the middle of the night, her baseboard heater turned itself on!
so then we ran around touching all the heaters...
we then discovered that the heater in the dining room had turned itself on too!
so we called our landlord to tell him... and he told us to flip the breakers... so we did, and they started to cool down....
what our landlord figured is that our heaters must have gotten so cold that they had to turn themselves on. So now we flipped the breakers to prevent anything from going wrong again.

My mom and I had NEVER turned the heat on in our apartment... cuz it's usually quite warm... so we didn't know there was a problem until they turned themselves on this morning...

It's funny how so often in my own life I do things (sin) and I don't properly deal with it... and for a while... life is great... peachy keen... then all-of-a-sudden this sin rises up and bites me in the butt... it tries to burn my "house" down... it tries to destroy me.

If my mom and I had been awake when this happened... we probably would've smelled it right away and then dealt with it... so the smoke alarm wouldn't have started screaming at us.
But we weren't awake... we were both fast asleep...
(I just remembered a few months back, they came to test our smoke alarm, until then, there was a DEAD battery in it... PTL they checked....)

In our spiritual lives, how often do we "fall asleep"? we forget to do our devotions, or we tune God out to do our own thing...
How many times do we allow ourselves to sin before eventually we realize what we're really doing... we pressing our beds up against our hot heaters and falling asleep!

Don't wait until tomorrow, if there's sin in your heart, deal with it now.... you never know if that alarm is going to sound in the middle of the night... and your batteries are dead...

Remember: the devil comes as a theif in the middle of the night to steal, kill and destroy
But Jesus came so that we can have life!