You can have the best-looking 4-wheeler (quad) in town, with all four wheels dressed up in brand-new tires with impressive treads, perfect for frolicking along an Alaska beach or Arizona desert. But it won’t get you anywhere if that vehicle won’t start. I know this from both fact and experience.
The gas tank can be full, the battery charged up, and it isn’t going to matter a bit until you get that thing started! So you tap here and there on a piece of metal, hoping to awaken a spark of life. And if you have the skill or intuition, or imagine you just might get lucky, you might even begin to take that machine apart, looking for that something that will make a difference.
Getting started … Even in life in general, that can be the hardest thing of all.
You can put your best-treaded running shoes on and never make it to the starting line, whether it’s that intriguing project you’ve been eager to get going on, or the one you’ve been putting on the back burner for years. But even a full tank of ideas doesn’t guarantee the energy and initiative needed to get the project in gear.
What stops us or gets in the way? Is it lack of confidence? … fear or depression? … difficulty in focusing or lack of clear direction? Do we continue to tap here and there, looking for that missing spark that we hope will bring us to life? Or do we finally come to a point when we have to admit that we need more than our own resources to get ourselves going, along with some better tools?
For me, one of those tools is prayer, but I don’t mean the usual kind where we ask God to give us this or that, or to do this or that for us. I’m talking about simply sitting with eyes and mouths closed, waiting for God to speak to our open hearts. Try it! Close your eyes, relax, clear your mind … and wait. And let God do the rest.
It’s amazing what a difference just sitting awhile with God can make in getting our engines back up and running again, and those wheels turning smoothly in the right direction.
thatgodthing 