Footsteps in the Sand

Today I was driving home in my car and I was listening to Relient K in my car and it got to the last song of the album… And the song is called Deathbed. It’s a fantastic song in my opinion… and it’s about a guy who’s life couldn’t have possibly gone more wrong… A life that is truly pathetic and pitiful… yet its a life you see so commonly around society… His father left his mother when he was 8, he gets addicted to alcohol and smoking at 14, gets married at 21 after getting his girlfriend accident, his relationship with his wife is very tense and unloving, he ends up getting divorced and the wife takes custody of the children and he ends up spending his days drowning his sorrows with whiskey and trying to distract himself by playing bowls. He eventually contracts lung cancer from his years of hardcore smoking and his lying on his deathbed. He reflects on how hopeless his life was… How sad and miserable it was… but as he was dying he remembers that at one point in his life he had accepted Jesus Christ as his saviour. And he clings to the hope of going to heaven because of it… and surely enough, as he dies, Jesus appears before him and takes him up to heaven with Him because of his faith. and the song ends with the famous lines from John 14:6 but slightly modified for the song “I am the way, follow me and take my hand. And I am the truth, embrace me and you’ll understand. And I am the life, and through me you’ll live again. For I am Love” … John 14:6 is “I am the way and the truth and the life. Noone comes to the father [In Heaven] except through me.”

It also reminded me of a poem named “Footsteps in the Sand” and it goes like this.

“One night a man had a dream.
He dreamed he was walking along
the beach with the Lord.

Across the dark sky flashed scenes from his life.
For each scene, he noticed
two sets of footprints in the sand,
one belonging to him and the other to the Lord.

When the last scene of his life flashed before him,
he looked back at the footprints in the sand.
He noticed that many times along the path of his life
there was only one set of footprints.
He also noticed that it happened at the
very lowest and saddest times in his life.
This bothered him and he questioned the Lord about it.

"Lord, you said that once I decided to follow you,
you'd walk with me all the way.
But I have noticed that during the most
troublesome times in my life there is
only one set of footprints.
I don't understand why when I needed you most
you would leave me."

The Lord replied "My precious, precious child,
I love you and would never leave you.
During your times of trial and suffering,
when you see only one set of footprints in the sand,
it was then that I carried you."

Now you might be wondering how these two even relate to each other… So I will explain myself.

Like the song I see that so many people have seen so much pain and suffering in their lives, with no direction and no hope or reason to live… and it’s very disheartening really. Life is like an obstacle course, and a very difficult one at that. and Jesus is always near us whether we believe in Him or not, whether we trust Him or not. He has already gone through the obstacle course of life as a human 2000 years ago and he passed with FLYING colours because He is God and He came down here to save us from ourselves. He wants to help us through life. And when we hit the part of the obstacle course where you have to cross the Grand Canyon on a tight rope, we struggle and we are clinging to the rope by the tips of our sweaty hands, Jesus is standing next to us with arms reached out waiting for us to reach out to Him so that He can carry us through to the end of the course. All we have to do is TRUST that Jesus can do it… Because we know we can’t do it ourselves… So you have nothing to lose.

The picture above is of Charles Blondin. A legendary tightrope walker… He is carrying his manager on his back as he is walking across the top of Niagara Falls on a tightrope. Life will push you into these hard times, imagine crossing the falls by yourself… I know I’d be crapping my pants, almost paralysed with fear… But like the image above, Jesus can carry you across… and although it would still be scary as hell, I know I trust Jesus to carry me through life more than I’d ever trust Charles Blondin to carry me over the Niagara Falls.

But yeah… That’s my interesting sharing for today…

Amazing Grace

A friend of mine gave me a book by Philip Yancey called "What's So Amazing About Grace?". And as the title implies, the book is about conveying grace, and understanding the very nature of the unconditional love of God towards us, and the unflinching forgiveness and intentional overlooking of our shortcomings by Him. Grace is to recieve what one has in no way deserved, Philip describes that the very nature of our secular world is one of ungrace, where you will never, ever recieve anything that you have not earned. No position, rank, job, promotion, etc. will ever be given to you out of grace. Respect and status is earned, we conform to society (which means you are constantly working to try and fit into the shape society says you should fit), all of these things are ungracious. The book talks about how even many christians, holding so tightly to their doctrines and to their rules and laws to become like the world, ungraceful. This is only the first 4 chapters of the book by the way :P. One of the paragraphs talked about a discussion between C.S. Lewis and some other people about what was so unique about christianity as a religion. The answer, was grace. To recieve the forgiveness we do not deserve, and to gain a relationship with God that came at no cost to us, all we had to do was to accept it. One of the first lines in the book was about a prostitute, wretched, homeless and sick selling of her 2 yr old child to support her drug addiction. When asked about whether she ever considered going to a church for help, her response was "Church! Why would I ever go there? I was already feeling terrible about myself. They'd just make me feel worse." I guess I'm simply repeating the authors words but I guess it just sheds new light upon old things. I'm becoming less and less coherent... I'm not sure if I'm actually making sense anymore... it's 3:13am... I'm tired... I need sleep...