I can still remember the day I learned to ride a bicycle. We were living in Kenya and I learned on the nice soft grass so I wouldn’t hurt myself too much when I crashed… and besides, the roads were all dirt on the mission station. It was later that I learned that falling on the road wasn’t a good idea. A friend and I crashed and I ended up with a broken collar bone.
When we moved back to Canada, my parents bought me a bike or two, but I remember when I had to buy my own bike for the first time! There was a significant change in how I treated that bike. I went from riding down the street, up the driveway and jumping off the bike to let it crash on the lawn, to using a kickstand!
I valued the bike more since I had some of my own equity in it. When my parents blessed me with a bike, I had a tendency to treat it with less respect.
When God is taking me through a hard time and I’m having to work harder than I think I should for an outcome that I know he wants in my life, I have to remember that the more sweat equity I have in the process of life-change, the more I will value it.
Thankfully, just because God can do something for us, doesn’t mean that he will do something for us!
Very tho’tful, son. I’d forgotten about the broken collar bone, as I’ve forgotten 1000 other things. I DO remember when you two Johns fell out of the avocado tree, and knocked you unconscious, and John stood over you paring the Lord would bring you back to life! Something about depending on something not trustworthy, like a dead branch, must have come out of that experience.