Last week Katy and I traveled to Broken Bow, OK for a family reunion. About 4 hours into our trip our van decided it wasn't going to drive anymore - our transmission went out! Luckily we were just a few minutes outside of Colby, Kansas. We called insurance and they payed for our van to get towed to a local mechanic. Once we arrived at the mechanic, we were faced with the big question - "now what?" We sat... and we thought... and we cried... and we stressed... until we final made a decision. We would get a rental car and continue the trip without our van. Little did we know there were no rental car companies in town - and so came the tears again. A local car dealership was able to point us towards a local repair shop that also rented cars on the side, and we just happened to get the only rental car available for over 100 miles. We had to drastically downsize our luggage from a big van to a small 4 door sedan, and then a few signatures later, we were on the road again! If it wasn't for that ONE SINGLE rental car in small town Colby, KS, we would have been stranded!

There really is a great lesson in this... don't break down in the middle of nowhere. No, but jokes aside - there is a reality that every person in the world must face at some point - they are stranded in their sins. At some point in our lives, each one of us has found ourselves stranded in our sins. Romans 3:23 says "All have sinned..." then just a few chapters later Romans 6:23 says, "The wages of sin is death..." At some point, everyone has been or will be stranded in sin with spiritual death sitting on their shoulders. The Bible teaches that the only way out of this death is through Jesus Christ. Acts 4:12 says, "There is salvation in no one else; for there is no other name under heaven by which we must be saved." There is only one way out of our spiritual break down in Colby, KS - and its not a 4-door sedan like we had, but it is a loving savior who gave his life so that we could be saved from our sins.

- Kolton Ballance