Life Goes Many Directions Yet Trust In God To Be Grounded

In order to trust God, we must view our circumstances through eyes of faith, not of sense.

“Those who know your name will trust in you, for you, Lord, have never forsaken those who seek you.” Psalm 9:10

I once bought some used equipment from an ad in a newspaper. When I called the number, an older lady answered and told me she did have the equipment I was looking for and that I was in luck because they were cutting the price in half!

“Wow. That’s good news,” I said. “Is there anything wrong with it?”

“Oh, no, sweetheart,” she responded. “We’ve had several people come look, but no one wants to spend the time picking them up so we thought we’d cut the price for the next person.” Cool. So I grabbed a friend and we headed off to the address the kind lady had given me. It was in Waldron, Ark., which normally was just about a 45 minute drive for me at the time. Four hours later!!!!! Apparently, Waldron’s zip code handles a geographical area about the size of Texas. It covers mountains, valleys, streams, rivers and little bitty one lane roads with nothing but two tracks for your tires to drive in. I was about as far away from civilization as you could possibly get. My friend described it as driving to the end of the world and then making a left.

Finally, we arrived at an old home place that had a mailbox with the address number on it. I say it was a home place because you really couldn’t see the home. Starting at the edge of the driveway and going back for acres and acres was stuff. Hundreds of old refrigerators. Thousands of pieces of old furniture. Couches, chairs, stoves, old shopping carts, appliances. . If you remember watching the old show “Sanford and Son” and the piles of junk Fred had in front of his house, multiply that by about a million and you’d have this lady’s place.

We got out of the truck and started to walk up toward the narrow pathway going to the home when all of a sudden a big, ugly dog lunged out of a cubbyhole it had made in the midst of the junk. Thankfully, it was on a leash but it was snarling and barking and baring its teeth like it was going to tear us up. I looked around and my friend was already halfway back to the truck.

The barking had brought the lady to the front yard and as she got closer she said cheerfully for us to come on into the yard. I looked at the lady and down at the dog and back to the lady and said, “Um. I don’t think your dog will let us.”

She said, “Who, Bull? Don’t worry about him. He thinks he’s a cat. Just say scat cat!”

I looked at my friend who gave me the reassurance of a shrug and furtive glance back to the truck. I looked at the dog and said “Scat, cat!”

Sure enough, at the words the dog went crawling back into the cubbyhole it had made in the junk piles. It even gave a whimper. I had to say, “Scat, cat!” about 20 times that day as we loaded equipment into my truck. And each time the dog stopped barking and trying to get at us and scampered back to its hole.

After we were on the way home my friend and I were talking about the dog and how much this big, scary dog did remind us of a cat in so many different ways. My friend said, “I guess he didn’t know who he really was.”

Sometimes, life blows us around in so many different directions that we may lose sense of who we are. We have so many roles to play in life — father, mother, worker, friend, leader, teacher, confidant — that it can be easy to forget what truly makes us who we are. That’s why having a solid spiritual life is so important. Because no matter which way the winds of life blow, we can always say, “I am a child of God.”

That will always keep us grounded. No matter how many times someone tries to convince us that we’re really not.