Asking Our Father to Help

Peter, a spry four-year-old boy was fooling around in his back yard.  His best friend lived next door and was in his backyard too, they were playing through the fence that separated the two yards.  In both of the little boys' yards, there was a huge rock.  Perhaps a boulder would be a better distinction to do the stone its justice.

Both boys were trying with all their might to move their respective boulders.  Peter could not make his budge.  His friend was equally unsuccessful with his stone, and frustrations were growing by the moment for each of the young boys.  Peter tried pushing, pulling, and prying to no avail.  He could hear his best friend struggling equally through the fence.

Peter could hear as his friend threw up his hands and exclaimed, "I give up!  I'm getting my dad to help me!"  His friend ran inside his house.  The next thing Peter heard was his friend, with dad in tow, coming out to the rock.  Peter peered through the gaps in the fence to see his friend's father walk over to the stone and, with no effort, lifted the stone over his shoulder and brought it to the outskirts of the yard and tossed it out of the yard and into the woods.

His friend was so excited and relieved, Peter could hear him shouting with glee.  This only strengthened Peter's resolve to move the stone himself.  He tried even harder than before to move the stone, still making no impact.  He could hear his friend go back inside as the sun began to set, but he was still no closer to moving the boulder.  He began to get very angry and started to cry out of his dejection.  Peter could easily have asked his able and willing father to help too, but he was determined to do it himself, without any help.  As a result, the boulder remained unmoved as Peter cried himself to sleep.

Aren't we just like Peter trying to move the immovable boulder without any help?  Life is full of stones for us to attempt to push around.  And, though we could easily ask our Heavenly Father for help, we turn back to the boulders like prideful and compulsive toddlers, just beating our heads against the rocks.

The boulders are there, they will always be there in our way.  How we handle them is the important thing.  We can either trudge against them like Peter, or handle them like his friend and call on the power and willingness of our Father in Heaven.  These are the two choices for dealing with trouble and challenges in life.  Let us then choose to rely on God at all times for all things because in doing so we are doing what He asks as well as what He wants!

Dancing in the Rainstorms of Life

Robert had never even been out of the country when he took his new position in Tokyo, Japan.  He was a product of southwestern America, where rain is scare and the sun is hot and clear.  Because of the obvious cultural distance and because he didn't want to be alone, Robert found a local man about the same age, Akiko Saitou, to be his roommate.

All was going well until the first earthquake and rain.  Japan is, essentially, a volcanic island that has never fully stabilized.  And, to a foreigner, this can be quite disconcerting, particularly when most of the locals view earthquakes and storms with a certain sense of apathetic reverence.  However, when the first real tsunami-like rains hit, Robert was dumbfounded.

In fact, Robert spent that first rainy season learning how to duck under canopies with ninja-like speed.  He thought that he was starting to fit in except that Akiko would always point and laugh at the ridiculousness exhibited by his wimpy, American roommate.  This sort of display happened every time the rains came with their tempestuous force, so that by the end of the season Robert had determined to find out why the Japanese were so calm during such torrential downpours.

Finally, on one such rainfall, after Akiko's usual chortles at Robert's unusual fear of rain storms, Robert went to Akiko and asked him, "Why is everyone here so calm when the sky is falling?  How can you be so cavalier when the rain is pounding like this?"  Akiko smiled at his roommate and, with a laugh, said in his decent but broken English, "My friend, you can spend all your life trying to dodge  and hide from the rain.  Or, you can simply learn to dance in it like the rest of us!"

Storms of this life are continuously stirring and pouring over our shoulders, filling our eyes with water and our hands with puddles.  A storm is anything in life that can break us down and damage us with its constant pommeling.  The trick is, as shared by Akiko above, to stop wasting so much energy fearing the rain and come to the place when you can dance in it.

The essence of this is sincere devotion and faith in God.  If we, when under stressful duress, will simply trust that God is who He is.  Needless to say, this is a daily if not momentarily exercise in faithfulness.  This will equip us with the lenses of God and His holiness that can make the most difficult of life's decisions seem as whim and frivolity compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ.  Let us then take this mind among us to depend on God so as to dance in the rainstorms of life!

Carrying One Stick of Trouble at a Time

John Newton, a sailor and clergyman during the 18th century, has a wonderful analogy of worry and anxiety worth paraphrasing:

All the worries and troubles of an entire year of life are life a giant pile of sticks. And each day, God hands us a single stick to carry for the entirety of the day.  At the end of each day we return to God and return the stick to him.  The next day, we wake up and God hands us another stick.  Each day has its own stick, not more and not less than we can handle.  Occasionally, we come to God and we ask him to hand us today's stick and tomorrow's, and by the end of the day we seem tired and beaten but we return again to God to give him back the sticks.  And some days, we feel haughty and sure so we ask for a week's worth of sticks.  And though God warns us, he hands us the sticks and tells us that he will be there to help us if we can't handle the sticks.  We turn to God, smile, and proceed to take from him the sticks, tie them into a wide bundle, throw the bundle over our backs and leave for our day.  At first, the bundle seems only annoyingly heavy but as the day bears on, the sticks begin to weigh on us as an ever-growing burden.  Thus, by the end of the day, we can barely move and each step feels like a trudge throw the deepest of mired bogs until we finally collapse under the weight of bundle.  As we lay there, beaten under the force of our own troubles bundled beyond our ability to care for them, God comes up behind us and picks the overwhelming bundle of sticks off us us with ease and helps us back to our feet.

The point is that, though our natural inclination is to take on today's, tomorrow's, and next week's challenges and worries, God has ordained that we should not take on more than what we can handle, for each day has enough trouble for itself (Matt. 6:34), and we should only attempt to take on that which God has placed before us for the moment.  God desires that we, in humility, press into Him to cover and care for our troubles and our worries.  Let us then do so with consistency, clinging to Him to preserve us when we would rather pick up the bundle of troubles and to be reminded to carry one stick of trouble at a time.