A Stick Floating on a Creek

Yesterday was a very pretty day here where I work. It was a bit chilly, but the temperature actually got up to around 50 degrees. On the advice of my girlfriend, I took a much-needed break and walked around outside for a little bit. Near my office building, there's a small man-made creek. It runs out of small pond, over some fair-sized rocks and stones, and it sounds just like a natural mountain creek. So during my break I walked down to listen to the water running over the stones, always a very calming sound for me.

There really isn't a good place to sit close to the stones, so I just stood for a bit and listened. I let the sound of the water soak into my body, let it rolling water carry me, let it seep into my soul. It was a very pleasant experience. I looked down and saw a stick on the ground, so I picked it up, broke it in several pieces, some large, some small. One by one, I dropped them into the rushing water just where it emerged from the small spillway from the pond. I watched the first piece roll around on the water. It was tossed about, it was smashed into rocks, it was swirled around by eddies. Eventually, it emerged at the bottom of the small rapids, clear of the stones and in calm water, where it floated almost happily for quite a ways down the creek until I lost sight of it.

I did this with each stick, dropping it in a slightly different place near the culvert, and I watched each piece take a completely different path down the small rapids. After all the tossing and smashing and swirling, each piece emerged at the same place: the calm water at the bottom of the rapids. After watching three or four of these pieces, I began to realize that our lives are just like those pieces of the stick.

We get dropped into the waters of life at different places, usually places of our own choosing. We make a decision or take a turn or say something or do something, and that determines how and where we enter the water. The rapids represent the consequences of our decisions and words and actions. Some of our rapids are longer, some are shorter, sometimes we float happily for a long way before we hit our rapids, sometimes we hit them right away. Some of us get smashed against the rocks more often, some of us spend more time swiriling aimlessly in the eddies. But when we're in those rapids, we all get tossed and smashed and swirled. And while we're in the rapids, it feels like we'll never get out.

But we all take different paths through the water, through the rapids. That's God's hand in our lives. He puts us on the exact path He wants us to tread. He guides us through the rapids, and even though we're feeling the tossing and the smashing and the swirling, the painful discomfort caused by the consequences of our decisions, He always leads us to emerge at the bottom of the rapids into the calm water, usually not much the worse for wear, just like all of those sticks. He guides us and protects us, and He doesn't let us get pulled under. We are all subject to His hand, whether we acknowledge Him or not, whether we believe in Him or not.

So next time I'm in the middle of the rapids, I'm going to try to remember this example that God revealed to me, and try to remember that no matter how much I'm tossed, smashed, and swirled around, He is with me, and He will see me through to the calm waters.