A woman was sitting in her lounge when a small black snake suddenly appeared, slithered across the floor, and made its way under the sofa. Being deathly afraid of snakes, she ran to the bathroom to get her husband, who was taking a shower. He came running from the shower with just a towel around his waist, grabbed an old broom handle from the cupboard, and began poking under the sofa.

At this point the family dog awakened. Curious to see what was happening, the dog came up behind the husband and touched his cold nose to the back of the man’s heel. The man, thinking the snake had bitten him on the heel, fainted. The wife concluded that her husband had collapsed with a heart attack, so she ran from the house to a hospital just a street away. The ambulance drivers promptly came to her house and placed him on a stretcher. But as they were carrying him out, the snake reappeared from underneath the sofa. One of the drivers got so frightened that he dropped his end of the stretcher and broke the man’s leg. Seeing her husband’s twisted leg, the wife collapsed on the spot. Meanwhile, the snake slithered quietly away!

An old African proverb says, ‘There are forty kinds of lunacy, but only one kind of common sense.’ Acting impulsively usually means things will get worse before they get better. So before you panic, calm yourself and ask God for wisdom and help, even in the simplest things.