Dear Friends of "Dial Daily Bread,"
This is a story I can vouch for, having spent some 24 years in East Africa. In the days when auto roads in Uganda were dirt and narrow, an angry, threatening elephant was blocking the main road from Kampala west to the Mountains of the Moon area. Finally, the Game Warden had to be called, who reluctantly had to shoot the beast. It was found that it had a painful abscess in a tooth. This is what caused its irrational rage.
Often we humans feel driven to anger, to impatience; yes, we do and say things that later we see are irrational. We create unpleasant crises. Like Paul in Romans 7, "I don't do what I would like to do, … what I do is what I don't want to do" (vss. 15, 16, GNB).
Could that unfortunate elephant teach us something? We have some painful abscess in the heart; we don't understand ourselves any better than the elephant understood himself. All we know is that something mysterious hurts deep inside. And then we fly off the handle, get impatient with each other, our spouse, or the kids, and get irrational and tear up the road.
The "abscess"? To tell the honest truth, it's bad heart feelings against God, often buried so deep we don't know them, like the elephant's pain. Things go wrong for us, we don't know why. We're frustrated, and that's when we go ballistic and can even make fools of ourselves. We're out of sorts with God.
He knows that, and He doesn't blame us any more than He blamed poor Job who had a monstrous "abscess"; but He can do something the Game Warden couldn't do. He can heal our "abscess." It's called, "Be ye reconciled to God." "God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself." The reason He can heal us is that He wrestled with the pain of the same "abscess"; on His cross He came VERY close to us when He cried out, "My God, why have You forsaken Me?" But He did not sin! Neither do you and I have to sin. By His grace He saves us, through faith. LET your hurting heart be healed. Don't stop His blessed process.
Copyright © 2010 by Robert J. Wieland.
Be sure to check your e-mail for "Dial Daily Bread" again tomorrow.
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Daily Bread - Readings about life and the Word of God.
