Up In The Northern Parts Near The Source Of The ...

Up in the northern parts near the source of the Mississippi, it was a bitterly cold winter, and the Mississippi River had frozen over. There was a man who, rather than going to the bridge, decided he would walk across the frozen ice. He didn’t see anyone else out there. It looked so crusty and so thick. He said, "I believe I can walk across. I won’t have to take the journey down to the bridge," and this man began to walk across that river on ice. When he got a distance from the shore, he looked at the other shore and thought, Maybe I ought not to be out here. Maybe this ice won’t hold me up. If I fall through, they’ll never know what happened to me. I’m a fool. What am I doing out here? And as he turned around to go back to the other side, he said to himself, "I better walk softly." Then he thought, I better get down on all fours, so I won’t put my weight in any one place. Then he said to himself, :"That’s not enough. I better lie down and squirm across. I may go through the ice. What a fool I am. My wife will never know what happened to me." He began to whimper and cry, and then he heard it, a roaring, cracking sound. "Oh," he said to himself, "The ice is breaking; I’m a goner." He put his face down. He began to pray, "God save me; help me Lord." The noise got closer and closer- that rumbling and roaring- but the ice didn’t seem to be breaking. He looked up, and there was a man with a team of horses with a wagon loaded with logs driving across that river. That was the noise he heard. When he saw that, he jumped up and brushed off the ice and took his stroll across the rest of the river.

What Every Christian Ought to Know, Adrian Rogers, P. 160.