Musings

Sunday morning my pastor (who also happens to be my father-in-law) used an illustration in his sermon that has stuck with me this week.  [As an aside, I was just thinking that I've had six pastors in my life, three of them have been my father, my husband, and my father-in-law.]  

But back to that illustration, he told of a man who needed to cross the St. Lawrence River in the winter, and he thought the frozen water could hold his weight, but he knew that at any moment the ice could crack, and he would drown in the freezing water.  So he crept, oh-so-slowly, across the river on his hands and knees, afraid.  He crept until he heard a noise behind him of a horse-drawn wagon pulling a load of firewood come rumbling across the ice full-speed ahead, at which point he felt very sheepish about his timidity and stood up and walked across the St. Lawrence River with a lot more confidence.

The image of that man creeping along out on the ice, afraid of the calamity that could come at any moment, while all the while the surface underneath him was rock-solid, impressed itself in my heart.  

How often does my soul act like I'm on thin ice with God?  How often do I wait for His judgment to fall at one out-of-line, presumptuous thought?  I don't always believe from the heart what I know to be true and what I'm reminding myself of this week, that in Christ, I'm not on thin ice, and "the eternal God is a dwelling place, and underneath are the everlasting arms."