Posted by quequel on January 17, 2003 at 09:29:38:
Thought I’d share this with you. Richard wanted me to read "The Prayer of Jabez," by Bruce Wilkinson, and although some of his teachings are a bit extravagant for me, I really enjoyed this section, where he talked about dependence on God:
One day when our kids were preschoolers, Darlene and I found ourselves with them at a large city park in southern California. It was the kind of park that makes a grown man wish he were a kid again. It had swings, monkey bars, and seesaws, but what was most enticing were the slides—not just one slide, but three—from small, to medium, to enormous. David, who was five at the time, took off like a shot for the small slide.
“Why don’t you go down with him?” Darlene suggested. But I had another idea. “Let’s wait and see what happens,” I said. So we relaxed on a nearby bench and watched. David clambered happily to the top of the smallest slide. He waved over at us with a big smile, then whizzed down.
Without hesitation he moved over to the medium-sized slide. He had climbed halfway up the ladder when he turned and looked at me. I looked away. He pondered his options for a moment, then carefully backed down one step at a time.
“Honey, you ought to help him out,” my wife said.
“Not yet,” I replied, hoping the twinkle in my eye would reassure her that I wasn’t just being careless.
David spent a few minutes at the bottom of the middle slide watching other kids climb up, whiz down, and run around to do it again. Finally, his little mind was made up. He could do it. He climbed up…and slid down. Three times, in fact, without even looking at us.
Then we watched him turn and head toward the highest slide. Now Darlene was getting anxious. “Bruce, I don’t think he should do that by himself. Do you?”
“No,” I replied as calmly as possible. “But I don’t think he will. Let’s see what he does.”
When David reached the bottom of the giant slide, he turned and called out, “Daddy!” But I glanced away again, pretending I couldn’t hear him.
He peered up the ladder. In his young imagination, it must have reached to the clouds. He watched a teenage boy go hurtling down the slide. Then, against all odds, he decided to try. Step-by-step, hand over hand, he inched up the ladder. He hadn’t reached a third of the way when he froze. By this time, the teenager was coming up behind him and yelled at him to get going. But David couldn’t. He couldn’t go up or down. He had reached the point of certain failure.
I rushed over. “Are you okay, son?” I asked from the bottom of the ladder.
He looked down at me, shaken but clinging to that ladder with steely determination. And I could tell he had a question ready. “Dad, will you come down the slide with me?” he asked. The teenager was losing patience, but I wasn’t about to let the moment go.
“Why, son?” I asked, peering up into his little face.
“I can’t do it without you, Dad,” he said, trembling. “It’s too big for me!”
I stretched as high as I could to reach him and lifted him up into my arms. Then we climbed that long ladder up to the clouds together. At the top, I put my son between my legs and wrapped my arms around him. Then we went zipping down the slide together, laughing all the way.
…Tragic as it may sound, the hand of the Lord is so seldom experienced by even mature Christians that they don’t miss it and don’t ask for it…When these believers arrive at points of certain failure, they tend to come to the wrong conclusion: ‘I’ve gone too far; I’ve ended up in the wrong place.’