Muleshoe pastor Curtis K. Shelburne writes weekly columns for the Clovis New Journal’s online edition. Here’s his most recent effort:

Sometimes I think my funny bone is oddly shaped or maybe dislocated.

For example . . .

I was heading home the other day when I noticed two signs, one almost on top of the other. One was a church sign: “House of Faith.” And just next to it was this sign: “Flats Fixed: Five Dollars.”

OK, so it’s not a knee-slapper, and maybe the combination of those signs would only produce a grin in a theologically-minded preacher. But it does get a smile out of me. And it does make me think.

I know I have an occasional flat tire and, yes, some “flat” days from time to time. If I had enough faith, would I have fewer flats (flat tires, that is)?

I couldn’t prove it, but I suspect that Christians and non-Christians probably have flat tires in about the same rate and proportions.

And I suspect that the same thing is true for heart disease and stroke, cancer and diabetes, etc. Oh, I am sure that a person who displays the “fruit of the Spirit,” who is not given to fits of anger and resentment, who enjoys all of God’s good blessings but is not a slave to any of them — I suspect that person will reap some physical as well as many, many spiritual benefits.

But we all live in the same fallen world. And people who live in this world have flats.

Yes, you might have a flat because you were where you had no business to be. If folks who drive to X-rated “bookstores” always came away with flat tires, they’d probably go there less often.

But folks also occasionally pick up nails in hospital parking lots while visiting the sick. And we need to be careful indeed about the conclusions we draw about the “why’s” of hardship and suffering in our lives and in the lives of the people around us. Bad things do happen at times to “good” people who are full of faith.

Just before Jesus healed a man who had been born blind, His disciples asked, “Who sinned? This man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus’ answer: “Neither.”

Sometimes when you’re traveling through this world, you just pick up a nail.