Good Monday Morning, Dear Friends,
One morning in Providence, Rhode Island, the editor of a national magazine was walking near a construction site. As he passed a half-completed building, he found a crowd gathered on the edge of the street. A man had fallen from a steel girder several stories above. The foreman of the construction crew told the editor that a near gale was blowing in from the sea that morning. The fallen workman had been walking along the girder leaning into the wind. Suddenly the wind shifted; the man lost his balance and fell. “This near the ocean,” said the foreman, “construction work is dangerous. You learn in a hurry never to lean against the wind.”
The point of that story is timeless. A couple thousand years ago, the small nation of Israel was under siege. The armies of the Assyrian Empire were threatening to annihilate the tiny nation. The people, sensing certain defeat, had turned to the Egyptians for help. However, there was in that little land a statesman named Isaiah. Isaiah knew that his people were exchanging one danger for another. He said something like this: “Woe to those who go down to Egypt for help and look not to the Holy One. The Egyptians are men not gods, and their horses are flesh, not spirit. You are leaning on the wind” (Isaiah 31:3).
Isaiah’s words remind us that the great possessions of life are not those things we discover on the outside but what we have within. Those who handle life well reach their conclusion by inner faith.
As a minister I often work with people who are walking through rough places. One thing I have long since concluded is that the most important question we can ask ourselves is, “What do I really believe?” There are really only two alternatives. We can believe that destiny is a matter of luck and what happens to us is the result of fate. If that position is true, however, then all effort is useless, and our struggles are in vain. It means that Adolf Hitler and Abraham Lincoln come out at the same place. I can’t believe that. There is another position I hold to be true. I believe the creative structures of this universe are so arranged that good seed finally brings a good harvest and the right road somewhere, sometime, comes out at the right place.
The real quest of life, therefore, is the quest for faith. That’s what Isaiah was saying to his people and to us. Don’t lean on the wind.
Learn to trust the “Unseen Hand,”
Bruce Jones, Pastor
Imagine Church
