On Easter Sunday, 2013, the southbound side of I-77 near the North Carolina-Virginia border was closed for hours following a massive chain of accidents. Police later reported that seventeen different collisions involved ninety-five cars and trucks. The wrecks left three people dead and more than two dozen injured, many of them seriously. The cause of the accidents was people driving into a thick fog that descended over the Interstate that Sunday afternoon. A police spokesman said, “Visibility at the time this accident occurred was down to about one hundred feet or less.”
As people continued to drive blindly forward, they could not see the danger that was just ahead until it was too late. Prudence reminds us to be on guard for danger—not just in the present but in the future as well. Because of the way our minds work, we often tend to discount what may happen in the future simply because it hasn’t happened yet.
“A prudent man foreseeth the evil, and hideth himself; but the simple pass on, and are punished.”—Proverbs 27:12