Yesterday while walking our two dogs, the puppy somehow managed to slip out of her harness. I grabbed hold of her before she got skittled by the cars in the car park. Then my husband proceeded to try and fit the harness back on, while I held her.
She hates having her walk interrupted for anything and patience is a virtue she has not yet learned. Instead of sitting quietly she wriggled and fussed and generally made the task far harder than it should have been. It was like trying to tame a wriggling snake covered in fur.
‘For goodness sake,’ I chided her. ‘Stop squiggling and squirming, and we’ll get it done a whole lot quicker.’ Of course, my words had not one bit of effect. Training a puppy is a slow process, I’ve found. What should have taken a minute ended up taking five, as she continued to wriggle and squirm.
And then it occurred to me how often we are like that with God. We say we’re going to walk with Him and that we will follow where He leads. But too often we want to keep tugging at the lead and walking a different way. Or we go rushing ahead to get where we’re going or we branch off into tangents that aren’t part of His plan at all. At times we may lag behind and struggle to keep up.
Sometimes we ask Him to deal with the problems in our lives. But instead of leaving the solution and timing up to God, we interfere and try and fix the situation ourselves. Usually all that happens is we end up stressed.
Or we ask God to deal with a specific sin in our lives but then complain and struggle against Him and generally get in the way of Him working.
Is there something you and I need to change this week so that we are walking more closely with the Lord and following His lead? Is there some problem or sin you need to hand over to the Lord and ask Him to deal with and trust Him to do it, not keep trying to snatch it back and fix it yourself? If we hand it over to God He will get it sorted a lot quicker than we could ever hope to.
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