Into Muddy Waters

On Saturday Traci and I took the kids to Huron Beach for a fun day of swimming and family togetherness. Now, this wasn’t the easiest thing for me to do since I’m not huge on the lake any more as I really prefer swimming in a pool, etc. However we have no pool, so I thought that the idea was a very good one as it was something different that we don’t normally do and it’s cheap.

So, we arrive at the beach and a few things become apparent to me right away. 1) It’s as rocky as Traci said it would be (I’d never been there, while she had) and 2) The water is quite nasty.

That is when it hit me. This is a small comparison of what Jesus headed into when he came to the world to save each and every one of us from our sins. Here I am looking at all the different reasons why this could be a “not so much fun” experience like the nasty water with the dead fish floating in it (we found that after an hour or so in the water), the crowd that kept building at the beach, the rocky beach itself, etc. It would have been so easy to look at all of that and just want to turn around and say that the family time is off and we were going home. Jesus could have done the same thing as well. He could have just seen how nasty the world was at that time and tell his Father that He didn’t have the heart to go through with it. Instead, He stayed, knowing the outcome of His time on earth and still willing to follow through with all that was planned for His life.

Now, I’m not comparing myself to Jesus, but instead, noticing how little outside things can easily keep us from the things that God has planned for our lives. That family time we spent on Saturday could become a memory that they’ll remember for the rest of their lives. It could easily be my last weekend event with my whole family, not hoping that I’d die – but instead just pointing that out. If we all don’t take the opportunities that are presented, we never know when the next one will come. I pray that the next time you are presented with an opportunity that you fully embrace it, just as Jesus did when He came to earth for all of us.