Mining Hazards.

Do you know the term “undermine”?  It is often used in reference to authority. For example, if a principal walks into a classroom and tells students “Don’t bother with that assignment your teacher gave you,” the teacher will likely complain the principal has undermined her authority. 

UNDERMINE. 

Think about what that word means. 

It is a mining term meaning to MINE-UNDER something. 

Miners don’t tunnel into the mountain to create some well laid-out office building, with ten floors, an atrium, and an elevator shaft down the middle.  Mining is nothing like that.  There are no right angles or straight lines as much as there is an organic, twisting path up, down, and all through the side of a mountain.  After all, mining does not follow a blue print, it follows the gold, the silver, or the coal.  You find a “vein” and you follow it as it twists through the mountain. 

But if you MINE-UNDER something heavy, it may come crashing down.  Dig too near the surface, the parking lot may cave in on you—or the railroad, or the local gas station.  In 1959, coal miners in Pennsylvania were ordered to dig illegally under the Susquehanna River.  Established protocols required a 35-foot floor beneath a river, but miners from far below tunneled up to within six feet of the water.  Suddenly, the river burst through, killing 12 miners and flooding the many interconnected mine galleries with 10 billion gallons of water!  To “patch” the opening in the riverbed, miners dropped railroad cars into the giant whirlpool that had formed in the river—(a whirlpool large enough to swallow railroad cars!?)

UNDERMINE is a powerful word, painting a terrifying picture.  As you work to build a great life for yourself, beware: sin can UNDERMINE your life and cause everything to collapse into a whirling vortex of debris and devastation! 

“Righteousness guards people of integrity, but wickedness UNDERMINES the sinner” Proverbs 13:6.

All of us are trying to BUILD lives—to develop careers, save money, nurture families.  Don’t let sin UNDERMINE everything great that you are trying to accomplish. 

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