TITLE: Hold My Hand By Leann Mabrey 10/16/09 |
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If you have ever walked with a small child who is just learning to walk, you will know that they are happy to hold your hand. In fact, if you let go they tend to stop walking and look at you expectantly. Then, as time goes on, they hold your hand less and less. They are more independent and expect you to let them make it on their own. The more confidant they get, the less willing they are to hold your hand. As they get bolder, they flat out refuse to hold onto you anymore.
My youngest daughter recently went through this and it aggravated me to no end. Day after day we would go for a walk and she would run away from me, cry and throw fits when I insisted she hold my hand. One day she was being more difficult than usual and she jerked her hand away from me and took off running. She got a few steps away from me and turned around looked at me smugly and ended up tripping over her feet and fell flat. As she sat there, crying and looking up at me like I was to blame I realized that is how God must feel when we pull away from him because we think we can do it all by ourselves.
When we first come to Christ, we hold onto him for each step we take, we read our Bibles like it’s the code to the best treasure. We fast and pray, go to every church meeting we possibly can. And then as we feel more confident as Christians, we start pulling away. We no longer crave his word, we stop fasting and our praying becomes a hurried phrase or two right before our eyes close at night. Then we miss a meeting or two and then we only go to the regularly scheduled meetings, missing here or there. And pretty soon we are pulling away harder. When we feel conviction on our lives, we turn away and ignore it. We tell God “don’t call me, I’ll call you”. And then we fall flat on our faces and we look at God and blame him. “Why didn’t you warn me, why didn’t you guide me?” “Where were you?”
As I looked at my daughter that day, wanting to scold her, I felt like I had been scolded. So instead I picked her up, dusted her off and kissed her ouchie. Then we kept on our walk and I realized God does the same thing. He picks us up, dusts us off, kisses our ouchie, and starts walking with us again.
The thing about it is, the very next day my daughter did the same thing again. And this time, I was a little less understanding. It was annoying, I mean how many times will she do this before she realizes I only want to hold her hand to keep her from getting hurt, and again, I felt the presence of God, gently reminding me that I do the same thing time and again. So I picked her up, dusted her off, kissed her ouchie and thanked God for being more patient than a mommy.
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