A Great Analogy for Christian Life…

Date: 9 Mar 2011 Comments: 0

I am in the process of finishing out the last few pages of Brennan Manning’s wonderful book “The Ragamuffin Gospel” and I came across a story that seemed very familiar to me. After thinking back, I have seen it in two other books that I have read recently but this time it really spoke to me as a wonderful analogy about how we should live as Christians. Here you are:

Imagine this! You are being purused by a vicious tiger in the forest and are running as fast as you can. When things couldn’t get any worse, you realize that you are coming up on a cliff edge. Right when you are about to lose hope, you suddenly spot a rope dangling off the edge of the cliff and quickly grab hold of it to escape the tiger. Unfortunately, as you begin climbing down the rope you see the cliff drops over 500 feet down and there are sharp, jagged rocks at the bottom. To make matters worse, you look up and see the tiger is now growling and clawing at the edge of the cliff and two little mice just below the cliff have decided to start chewing through the rope you are on. In the midst of all of this, you look in front of you  and see a wonderful juicy strawberry right in front of you. You eat the strawberry and Yum! That was really good!

The moral of this story? We live in constant worry about our past… what is behind us (the tiger at the top of the rope), we are fearful about what the future may hold (the mice and the jagged rocks) and yet we still need to look around and see the wonderful gifts that God has provided us in this very moment (the strawberry). Often times we will find that as long as we are looking around us at the wonder of God’s creation we will find how great the blessings are in the present moment. If we live every day in constant admiration of what God is doing in our life we will be able to understand how wonderful His love is and trust his guidance to direct us.

As a brief update, I am still serving in NWBC happily yet I am also being considered for a new ministry position. I won’t go into much more detail about it now as there is still no way to know if I will even be considered. I just know that they are researching me as a candidate. As I plan and prepare for this, I have been thinking back to some of the things during my previous ministry position that made it so challenging and now that I am out of the heat of the moment, I can see many ways I could have done some things to change the circumstances a little. Would that have changed the end result? Probably not because God has this planned out much better than I ever could.

I keep repeating the same prayer to myself – whatever you want of me, O Father, I freely give for there is nothing in this world I have earned on my own merits. Yet I pray that you will embolden my mind with your Holy Spirit as I seek Your will in everything I do.

Amen and God Bless!

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