DANGER! Quicksand!
When someone is lost their reaction is often more like someone sinking in quick sand than someone formulating a plan to ‘get found.’ I’ve heard it said that th
e very worst thing you can do when you are sinking in quick sand is to ‘fight hard and make quick and jerky motions.
It only hastens the inevitable.
Or does it?
Actually, no. That’s just a myth. Read here to see that I am not making this stuff up. What you’ll learn is that most deaths involving quicksand come from friends attempting to save the victim never realizing that pulling the injured party from quicksand requires approximately the same amount of strength as that needed to lift a medium sized car! It can’t be done. And even if you had a wench (careful, not that kind of wench!) to help you out, you’d actually tear the victim in half before you managed to save him. He might as well be trapped in a pool of superglue!
Fortunately, most people do not have a wench at their disposal so there have been very few quicksand deaths by ripping! But it doesn’t keep people from trying this useless method above all others for hours on end.
The most common way people die when in quicksand has more to do with the location of the offending granulars. since thick, watterry sand is most often located near water (think beach here), the high tide is what gets you! If you do not manage to get free of this sandy trap by the time high tide comes in…well,
You’re a gonner!
What does all this have to do with being lost?
Simply this, apparently there are very few options for successfully getting out of quicksand unscathed. On last count, exactly…1. Here it is:
So how do you get out? Don’t ask your friends to tug on you; they’re likely to pull you “into two pieces if [they] try hard to pull [you] out,” said Bonn, a physics professor at the Van der Waals-Zeeman Institute at the University of Amsterdam.
“The way to do it is to wriggle your legs around. This creates a space between the legs and the quicksand through which water can flow down to dilate [loosen] the sand,” he explained. “You can get out using this technique, if you do it slowly and progressively.”
It might take a while, but follow this prescription and you’ll be absolutely fine. You may be picking sand out of your nose and ears for a while, but otherwise you will be good as new.
What strikes me about this one effective method is that it is the exact opposite of what nearly everyone has ever heard you are supposed to do when trapped like this. However, in this case heeding the myths will get you killed but trusting someone who knows—even when it goes against everything you thought you knew—will save your life.
Well, it’s pretty easy to realize you’re lost when you’re alone and waist deep in a potential sandy grave. It’s a lot harder to make that determination in everyday life as we go about our daily routines. We don’t seem to be in any trouble. There does not seem to be any hurry. And man seems to have a lot of great answers to life’s problems, but here’s what God says about man’s brilliant “lifeplans.â€
There is a path before each person that seems right,but it ends in death. Proverbs 14:12
No, when it comes to being spiritually lost, there’s only one way out of the eternal predicament. The way is a person.
Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. John 14:6
He’s the way, the map, the GPS, True North…all the above.
Are you lost?
Jesus knows the way home.
Cool link of the day:Â http://dzelque.blogspot.com