To live happily, purposefully, and with gratitude, we need to set goals for ourselves. If you don't have any goals, make your first goal setting some goals.
"Commit to the Lord whatever you do, and your plans will succeed." Proverbs 16:3
When I was a child, my grandparents owned a farm I used to spend my summers at. There is just something about a farm that makes you appreciate our Lord and all of Creation. Even when you're a child.
I remember my Grandpa's barn. A place he continually warned me not to go into. And a place where I frequently and secretly went. It was dark and musty and had all sorts of instruments of pain inside it.
There weren't any lights in the old barn. So when you came out of the bright summer sun, creaked open the door and stepped into the darkness of the barn it was like a secret spelunking adventure. In my mind I imagined finding some old caveman paintings drawn on the walls.
It seemed like everything in the barn could hurt you. There were discarded rolls of partly used barbed wire that lay in wait like a silent bear trap. It had a particular tendency to sneak up on little five-year-old bare legs.
There were stacks of disc plows that had been sharpened so much by the rocky gardens that they could cut you if you simply looked at them.
There were blades from sickles hanging on the walls like some old weapons of war. There were rusted nails sticking through every board of the wall. And every knothole that had been eaten away by the ravages of time was jammed firmly shut with generations of red wasp nests.
Every step you took was an adventure. Every creak was a monster in the dark and every item you found represented archaeological evidence of a long ago warrior tribe.
But the best place about the old barn was its loft.
It had one entrance through a little two-foot by two-foot square hole. The ladder to the hole had long since disappeared and all that was left was a dark hole beckoning to be climbed through. I'm sure the loft couldn't have been more than eight feet high, but to a four-foot tall boy, it seemed as tall as the Eiffel Tower.
I spent days looking up through the hole, trying to get a glimpse of the new worlds just beyond its darkness. I tried to jump but couldn't even reach the ceiling. I tried climbing the old poles that held it up but only came away with centuries old splinters as big as most kindling. It was physically out of reach. But in my mind it was only an invention away.
An invention of say, a stack of paper thin wood milk crates. Which were too rickety. Or five old tractor tires. Which were too heavy to stack. Or a pile of old potato sacks. Which were too dusty to move.
Then it occurred to me. What was needed was a ladder. So I gathered up old pieces of wood. Wiped off the black ants and termites that had made the wood their home and gathered some of the old rusty nails that had fallen out of the barn walls. It took a week. I had to use an old horseshoe for a hammer and the nails broke in half when you hit them but I finally had a ladder of sorts which I gingerly raised toward the loft, afraid the whole thing would come tumbling down like a stack of Lincoln Logs.
The loft held a mixture of old a hay that had already burst from its bales and nests of red wasps and hay snakes. But it also held a treasure. It had loft doors. And when I finally pried open the old latch that held them tightly shut all of a sudden light burst into the old barn and what was once a scary, dark cave suddenly became an amazing bright and inviting adventure.
Sometimes in life we find ourselves in dark and uninviting places. But if you set for yourself a goal to love God, trust in Jesus and listen to the Holy Spirit, light will burst forth and instead of being drudgery, life will become an adventure.
PASTOR TROY CONRAD IS MINISTER OF THE FARMINGTON UNITED METHODIST CHURCH.
Religion on 07/29/2015