Yesterday as I was driving around Sherman delivering flyers to my Pansy, Pumpkin, Pulled Pork Festival I'm having at my model home this Saturday my brakes started making a funny noise as I would press down on them. I hated that sound and it made me cringe so I turned up the radio and blocked it out. It seemingly worked because I couldn’t hear the sound anymore…………………... This is the way I used to deal with life in general, I would mask the problem, ignore the problem, or drown out the problem and  I never dealt with the actual problem I only dealt with the symptoms. It finally all caught up with me and almost destroyed my life. In high school I was given a ‘72 pale yellow Cutlass Supreme with an 8 track player and white leather seats when I turned 16. I loved that car but I was given that car with no instruction at all: I knew to put gas in it but that was about it, I didn’t know about oil or any of the other things that made a car run efficiently. Needless to say one day my car started making a really loud knocking noise. I hated that sound so I turned up my 8 track player and listened to the Beach Boys  ( Be True to your School, California Girls, Barbara Ann), Ted Nugent, Boston, Grease, etc.  as loud as I could. The knocking  sound seemingly went away but of course it really didn’t . My car was out of oil and I didn’t heed to the warning so there was a lot of damage that thankfully we were able to fix.  That incident, in a way,  foreshadowed what would happen to me personally  because I didn’t stop and deal with the any of the many problems  running rampant in my life, I just tried to pretend they weren’t there as if that would make them go away. Because of that negligence there was a lot of long term damage. God has been able to put most the broken pieces back together again but it would have been a lot simpler on me as well as my family if I would have addressed the problems at hand when they arose and not tried to hide them, numb them, or drown them out with busyness.  Yesterday I finally turned the radio down and listened closely.  Tomorrow I am getting my brakes looked at. This incident with my car now and back when I was a teenager reminded me we should listen to the warning signs in our life whether it has to do with our health, our car, our behavior , our relationships , and so on . We can’t afford to ignore them or pretend they aren’t there because in all these instances we can drown out the signs for a little while but the root of the problem is still there getting larger and soon will most likely grow out of control. It is best to nip it in the bud and cut it off at the root: ))