Got an unpaid ticket?

​Our family is always low on cash.  We use credit cards for literally everything we buy, including a $2.00 candy bar.  I’ve always got these points schemes running, points on the charge card, fuel points for buying Kroger gift cards.  You name it, a card is going to get used.  Therefore, when we’re going through toll booths, it’s a challenge.  At Thanksgiving, Kim’s son Nathan was in from Raleigh and we were re-telling his famous story about trying to come to West Virginia and having no money for the tool booths, trying to get them to take his American Express card and being horrified that they wouldn’t accept it, so he tried to do a back roads detour to miss the toll booth and then just came upon another one.  He tries to give them his driver’s license to hold as an IOU until he could come back, and they just took a picture of it and sent him a ticket.  What an ordeal for $2.00!
 
Kim then tells of when she was trying to get to Duke to be with her husband on the trip that he eventually died, and he is in the ambulance behind her.  She drives through the EasyPass booth holding cash in her hand, she is so whacked out, then the next toll booth would not take her extra $2.00 she tried to pay to avoid a ticket. 
 
That reminded me of when Talia was Miss WV and she got this modeling job in New York City.  It wasn’t very well paid (perhaps paid in dresses and clothes – can’t remember now) so we opted to stay in Newark in this dive of a hotel on my free hotel points (see, using credit cards does pay off!).  Anyway, we’re getting up every morning and driving into the city, and we didn’t know how much time to plan and we had driven all the previous day and were worn out, and we’re in this sea of vehicles and up comes some tool booth type deal.  There was no person in it, and it just had one of those change catcher things, and we didn’t even know what the toll was, so we just zipped through thinking they’d never catch us because we were driving a rental car that a Ford dealership in Morgantown provides Miss WV to drive on her year of service.  They changed those cars out every month to a new one, so who would be the wiser?  And the main truth is that we just were so freaked out by the enormity of the traffic and not knowing really where we were, that we just weren’t up to the figuring it out with all those impatient New Yorkers right behind us.
 
By the next morning, we had asked and knew what to do, but we were VERY SHOCKED to find out you have to pay like $16.00 a day to get into the City of Manhattan!  I thought $6.00 to get to Beckley was bad.  We had such a good trip that time – Tal would model all day at the Javitz Center, and I would walk the streets of NYC or just sit somewhere and read or talk on the phone and wait on her.  I’d get lunch and take to her and then we’d go out for supper and piddle around and shop or whatever.  Good times!
 
But it was not good times when TWO YEARS go by and she gets a call from the Morgantown dealership with a “Hey, did you have our car in New York such and such day?  Because we just got a bill from the Turnpike Toll Division for $175.00!”  Of course, she can’t think of the details, but she says she is sure she did.  They send us the bill, and the original amount was maybe $2.50, then they add on $100.00 or so for having to send you a paper bill through their automated system, and then another $75.00 went on because it was a rental car and that required more research and paperwork.  Can you believe that?  I sure won’t run one of those things ever again.  They’re Nazis about getting their cash!
 
We laughed telling these stories, but it reminded me of how when we tell a lie or do something deceitful, it ALWAYS comes back to get us.  One lie leads to another, and one sneaky thing leads to another sneaky thing.  One way or another, the truth always comes out, and you have to own your mistakes and your sin.  What a blessing it is that there is a Savior who can erase those “tickets” in the blink of an eye, who can make you not afraid of what’s just around the corner, or what might be uncovered.  Because see, when Jesus gets involved, He covers it all and he throws those sins as far as the East is from the West.  Aren’t you glad??

---