I recently took our van to a service station to replace the rear turn signal on the passenger side. The job didn’t take long, and soon I was on my way home.

Later that day, I noticed that a tire was low, so I put some air in it. The next morning the tire was completely flat, so I pumped it up and drove to the same service station I had been to the previous day. It just so happened that the leaky tire was the rear one on the passenger side.

When I told the manager in the office about my leaky tire, he promptly opened the door to the garage and loudly asked, “Which one of you guys put a turn signal on the rear passenger side of a van yesterday?” One of the workers indicated that he was the one who had done the job. The manager continued, “Well this guy wants to know what you did to cause his tire to go flat!”

The manager soon confessed that he was joking, but not before he got a reaction from his employees.

It is no joke that we sometimes try to blame our problems on something or someone other than ourselves. The Bible says, “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9).

Blaming others won’t get us out of predicaments that we have created for ourselves. We need to be honest with ourselves and take responsibility for our own actions, admitting when we have messed up.

Then we need to turn the problem over to Jesus.