In this, it may be incredibly difficult to see God. When things have gone from bad to worse, when there's nobody left, when the days get short, and the chips are down, it's hard to see God. I understand that.
But you know, as tempting as it may be to default to the 'footprints' poem, where there was only one set of footprints when God was carrying you through your hardest times, maybe a better image was given to me by one of our Sunday School kids on Sunday. She was a little fidgety at the communion rail, and when her parents tried to get her back to her pew, she didn't want to go. And as her father picked her up in his strong arms, she said this:
No! I don't want you to carry me!
There are a great many times in which we don't want God to be carrying us around. We have no interest in him being interested in us. We want to fix stuff on our own, we want to make it right, we want to do whatever we can to make sure things are good for us. And then they aren't. They aren't perfect. They're a long way off. And suddenly, they've gone too far for us to fix. All you're left with sometimes is a big pile of broken dreams, and no way of making things better. The time is over. The umbrella is torn, the milk is spilled, the metal has rusted away. And all you have left is regret. And that's exactly the moment in which you resist God's help.
It's human nature, I suppose. When your heavenly father reaches over to pick you up in his strong arms and to bear you to safety, you don't want him to carry you. It's the way we've always been as people, the help we desperately need, we refuse. It's that way from the time that you're a baby, and you're exhausted, but you'll fight sleep like nothing else. As the Terminator said in Terminator 2: Judgment day:
It's in your nature to destroy yourselves.
And you all thought that was spoken about nuclear war against the machines! No, it's about the thousands of small moments throughout a day, where you have what you want RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU but somehow you manage to drive it away. On purpose. You drive your family away, though there's nothing you want more than them. You drive parents away, though you love them and care for them. You snap at spouse and kids, even though they're the most important thing in the world to you. And you say to God: I don't want you to carry me. Better to be dead than wrong.
Well, folks, there are a lot of broken relationships out there tonight. A lot of heavy hearts. And you are staring down the possibility that your relationship might be breaking. Or broken. Or whatever. And you may be looking all around for God and finding him nowhere. But for goodness sake, let him carry you. Let him do the work that he wants to do. When you're about to faint from your human weakness, when you're about to pass out, when you've got wedges driven between you and everyone you know about, when you've tried everything you know and it hasn't worked, stop. Switch burdens with our Lord. That's what he's offered to you. Give him what you have that is burdensome, give it to him and be troubled with it no more.
Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me. For my yoke is easy. And my burden is light.
God's blessings to you in your hurt and weakness, friends. If you have time, even at the eleventh hour, to make things right, then be reconciled to your brother. Make things right if you can. If you can't then turn it over to God, in humble submission. Learn from what has happened, and do your absolute level best to not push away what you've always wanted anymore.
PJ.
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