We the Plants…

Have you ever noticed how a plant will start to grow and bend toward the light? Of course we know the plant does this because it needs the light in order to… LIVE. Isn’t it funny how these simple organisms, that have no brains or emotions (despite what some tree-huggers may say :-p) know enough to do such a thing. I mean we may take it for granted, but the fact that plants know they need light in order to survive, so they will do ANYTHING they can to reach it, is pretty remarkable.

 

Notice the phrase, “THEY REACH IT.”

 

See plants don’t expect the sun to move for them, nor do they expect anyone to come along to move them into the light. They have it programmed to reach for that light.

 

As weird as it sounds, we are a lot like plants.  We know we need The Light in order to survive. We know that without The Light, we die. Unfortunately, unlike plants, many times just because we may not see The Light right now, we expect that Light to move around to meet us instead of us reaching out to meet The Light.

 

Going through life, we are like plants that when we were seeds, we fall down to the ground ready to take root. However as time goes by, dead plants and other debris begin to fall on top of us, blocking out The Light from reaching us. When this happens, some plants will push their way up and out in order to reach the light, where others can’t, stay trapped under all that debris, and eventually die.

 

Our walk with God, the One True Light, shouldn’t be like that plant that stays trapped. What we need to see is that the light hasn’t moved or changed because the plant got trapped. It wasn’t the light’s fault that things fell on top of the plant, and the plant knows this and doesn’t blame anything on the light. The plant knows that it got itself buried, and now has to do something to get out of it. It is up to that plant to find a way out of that debris to reach the light… not up to the light, nor can that plant wait around and just hope for someone to stroll by and move off the debris that is on it.

 

It may sound silly, but many of us are like this. In life, we go through things; some good, and some not so good. We may start to dabble here and there in sins of this world… just a little. However, as time goes on, we soon start to see that sin will take us farther than we want to go, keep us longer than we want to stay, and cost us more than we are willing to pay. Then comes the reality check, where are eyes open and we see just how far away from God have become.

 

Just like the plant that is trapped under the debris, The Light is still shining bright. It hasn’t changed one bit. Just because we have a hard time seeing the Light, doesn’t mean it stopped shining. CS Lewis once said, “The instrument through which you see God is your whole self, and if it’s not kept clean, your glimpse of God will be blurred.”

 

When we get ourselves trapped, we need to strive to push through to reach the Light. Unfortunately too many of us don’t think it is up to us to reach toward the Light, and expect it to change for us. Our vision gets blurred we begin to think that it is God’s fault for us getting trapped into the things that we got ourselves into.  We get into this mindset that, because it may take a little sacrifice, or a little temporary pain to change our situation in order to reach the Light, we just will wait around for the Light to change for us or someone else to move us.

 

Fortunately for us, we DO have a Light that will reach down to us and meet us right where we are at, BUT that doesn’t mean we can stop reaching for Him. God is ALWAYS reaching down to try to help us. But if we’re not reaching up, how do we expect to grab hold of God’s hand?