Highway 62 between Cynthiana and Georgetown, Kentucky is a definitional section of twisting backroad. In the seven or eight mile stretch west of Leestown, it dips and bucks, cuts and cups, switches and sways like a bag of crippled rattlesnakes. It’s not a fun drive.

But, since 1999, construction of a new road has proceeded by fits and starts. It’s not an easy section of roadbuilding. On the bucks, workers have to drill a series of cores through as much as thirty feet of solid limestone, then blast it into moveable chunks. The chunks are hauled to the dips, filling them in to level the roadway. It’s slow, but by eliminating the up and down and the side-to-side slithering of the old road, the new route will cut both distance and time for drivers.

There’s another road under construction just north of Georgetown off Route 25. Developers of a new subdivision cut it in just a few days. One reason is it’s a lot shorter. But the bigger reason is that there’s no leveling. All they’ve done there is cut through the top fifteen inches of so of dirt, following the lay of the land. It’s a lot easier to build a road that way. But it’s not easier for the years to come. It’s more prone to buckling, potholes and cracking and cannot support heavy traffic use.

Sometimes, people come to Christ, wanting only the top layers of obvious sin and sinful practice stripped away. The wild parties, drug use, heavy drinking, fornication, etc. It’s always good to get rid of sin but scraping through the top layers of dirt doesn’t prepare us for the life of holiness. For that, Jesus has to bore into the foundations of our heart and blast loose the foundations of sin:  habits of thought, secret desires, lusts and negative emotions like jealousy, envy, rage, bitterness, unforgiveness, etc. It’s not as quick or as easy as the other route.

But it does level our path for the years to come and provides us with a foundation for a life that won’t sway and buck with the changes of weather.

H. Arnett

2/16/01