TJ and the Rocks
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The other day Lindsey and I took our 1 year old son Keller to the playground at church. There were several parents and children there and all the kids were playing and having a good time.
I went over and was helping Keller up and down the slide. TJ Brown, a 3 year old, was trying to walk up the part of the slide that you are supposed to slide down. He couldn’t get up there and he was starting to get frustrated. Now granted, this is no easy task for a little man. But TJ had complicated the situation for himself; in one hand he had some sort of little bucket, and his other hand was full of small rocks and pebbles.
I went over to help him out.
“TJ, if you’ll put those things down you’ll be able to climb up.”
“I can’t,” he replied back. He sounded so up in the air about the situation, like he was trying to decide what he needed to do, but couldn’t force himself to make the right decision.
I watched for about 5 minutes as he tried and failed to get up the slide. Eventually, he threw down the rocks and the bucket and went up the slide on his first try with free hands.
What a great application to my life. Sometimes I get so busy holding to all these unimportant things that I can’t make the climb to new spiritual heights. I can either hold on to my will or I can seek God’s will. It’s an easy decision really, and I know what I should do, but for some reason I get caught up in holding on to all these things that I don’t really need.
What about you? What are you holding on to that’s keeping you from climbing? Maybe it’s your work. Maybe it’s your stuff; material possessions. Maybe it’s that one sin that you secretly don’t want to let go of. Whatever it is, it’s keeping you from doing the very thing that God created you to do: reach amazing spiritual heights. And here’s something else: you can’t stand at the bottom of the slide with handfuls of rocks and tell other people how to reach the top. You need to be climbing successfully first and showing them how it’s done.
See, you can’t do both. You can either hold on to the world or you can climb the slide.
Climb the slide…