Lessons From The Wheelbarrow
Surviving Life’s Storms
Published by John Carothers at Smashwords
Copy 2011 John Carothers
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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Chapter One: PROLOGUE
Numbers can be difficult to wrap our minds around. Take the number 4 million; it’s so large that we find it difficult to put it in perspective, how high would a stack of 4 million cheeseburgers be? Now try imagining a stack of 20 million cheeseburgers. See my point? What if instead of cheeseburgers we were talking about 4 million people plunged into poverty in the last year? Or 20 million unemployed or under-employed, or just plain discouraged into despair?
When we’ve got 24 million people added to the ranks of people in poverty and unemployed, the numbers are simply too large to get a handle on. But each one of those 24 million people is in a life storm and they all have a story to tell. How long would it take to listen?
Not since the Great Depression have we seen numbers this stark, we all have friends or family members affected, we know their stories, but there is no way as individuals to grasp the enormity of human suffering out there, there are simply too many stories. Those folks are all going to have to get in the wheelbarrow.
Chapter Two: GET IN THE WHEELBARROW
On a visit to the circus you watch a high-wire artist pushing a wheelbarrow across a wire suspended one hundred feet in the air without a net. Because you see him do it, after a few minutes you become convinced he has the needed athletic skills and sense of balance to push the wheelbarrow across a high-wire without plunging to his death. That’s trust.
Faith is getting in the wheelbarrow.
For many of us getting in the wheelbarrow is a terrifying prospect, and yet there are often times when there is no choice. The way ahead is not clear and life feels much like driving in a dense fog, or the situation you find yourself in is so overwhelming that no path to serenity can be found. So, trembling and fearful, you get in the wheelbarrow.
Be obedient we’re told, yet obedience is not always the problem. Sometimes the way ahead is not clear and we simply don't know what God wants us to do, if we did we'd be obedient. That’s frequently the problem with obeying God; we just don’t know what His will is in our life. Sure, do not commit adultery, don’t lie, murder, or steal, take care of widows and orphans and feed the poor, these are simple instructions anyone can understand. My boss is insufferable and makes my life miserable to the point of depression but I have children to feed and my wife is sick and we need the health insurance, I can’t quit so what do I do? Or the job is long gone, your home is being foreclosed, you’ve exhausted your savings, and you have a family to feed and clothe. The choices in front of us are not always black and white, in fact, in many instances there are no good choices at all. Life’s not simple and straightforward, so it’s into the wheelbarrow we go.
Another problem with getting in the wheelbarrow is that it’s an admission of complete defeat. The problem or issue has defied every effort to overcome it with our own unaided resources, literally driving us to our knees, and now there’s nothing left but to climb into the wheelbarrow and ask God to fix it. That we should have done that in the first place is obvious, but we didn’t, so there we are, broken and pleading for mercy. After months, even years of trying to force a situation to conform to our will we finally give up in despair, “OK God, I can’t take it anymore, I have really screwed this up, please show me what to do.”
Fortunately, in many instances God doesn’t seem to penalize me for how I get in the wheelbarrow, it’s just important that I get there.
I was raised in a church going family. We went twice on Sundays, Wednesday Bible study, Friday night youth groups, boy did we go to church. So in 1968 I went away to college. It was the height of the Vietnam War and campuses were filled with rock and roll, radical politics, and free love. Drugs were the new path to spiritual enlightenment and alcohol flowed like a river.
At least that's what I saw. So I looked around and knew that this was no place for a devout, God-fearing boy such as me. So I stopped going to church. People all around me were gleefully sinning and I wanted in. Turns out my faith was a mile wide and an inch thick and I abandoned the principles I was raised in with no more thought than I would devote to changing socks. That didn't work out to well.
By early June of 1989 I was homeless, drinking a 1.75 liter of vodka a day, shaking like a leaf, throwing up blood, passing blood through my bowels, and all I wanted was to die. Instead, within a few short days I was snatched from the jaws of the monster by the God of second chances and delivered into the loving arms of a group of Good Samaritans, not all of them Christians.
Overnight my will to live returned, and then my new found friends told me that in order to live I had to stop drinking. At that moment I knew I was doomed, I had failed miserably in the past to stop or control my drinking, why would these odd sounding 12 steps prove any different?
It was then I got in the wheelbarrow for the first time in my life. There simply wasn’t any alternative that I could see, my life was a total disaster, friends and family had fled for their own safety, I saw no hope of success for the remedies being offered by these 12 steppers, and yet I had nowhere else to turn. So I did what they suggested, every morning I asked the God I had turned my back on 21 years earlier for help in staying away from a drink and thanked Him at night before I hit the sack.
That was over 22 years ago and I’ve been sober ever since. My behavior during the 21 years I drank and drugged earned me, as my Lutheran friends say, God’s “temporal and eternal damnation.” What I got was mercy and a seat in the wheelbarrow.
When you’re forced into the wheelbarrow, there’s no mixture of self-sufficiency and God reliance, your efforts have failed you totally, and it’s all God,
Many times in the middle of the turmoil I don’t realize I’m being self-reliant, not God reliant, after all I’m praying for guidance, I just don’t notice that I’m charging off into action without waiting for God to respond with the guidance I asked for, mostly because I know what I want, and I’ve forgotten that God knows what I need and the two often aren’t the same.
That’s how my walk with the Lord goes all too often; sometimes I get our roles confused. I get to thinking God needs help with the executive decisions and I lose track of the fact that God steers and I row.
Chapter Three: STAY IN THE WHEELBARROW
Life’s storms drive us into the wheelbarrow, but often that only marks the beginning of the storm’s end, and staying in the wheelbarrow can be excruciatingly uncomfortable until the storm finally subsides. Too many people leave the wheelbarrow because they think God’s will isn’t working when really the problem is they’re not getting their way, and the results are disastrous. They quit before the miracle happens.
One day I was channel surfing on the TV and I came across an outdoor sportsman’s program about quail hunting. Now I’m not a hunter but it was interesting so I watched it. I noticed that as the hunting dogs approached the bush the quail were hiding in, nothing happened. But as the dogs barked and jumped around, the quail, no longer able to stand the noise and turmoil, burst into flight at which point the hunter killed them in a burst of buckshot and feathers. Had the quail been able to endure the chaos and terror of the dogs and stayed in the bush they would have been safe.
So how do you stay in the wheelbarrow when every nerve screams, “Take Flight?” One thing’s for sure, if you wait to learn how to stay in the wheelbarrow until you’re actually in the wheelbarrow you’re in big trouble. The problem with life’s wheelbarrow moments is that they’re often unexpected, they come on us with no warning and once you’re in the middle of the life storm the time for preparation is long gone. So we need to be ready.
When I was about six months sober I walked into a meeting and there was a man at the table who had been very kind to me at a time that I was desperate for kindness, sensing that he was really upset I sat next to him and asked him what was bothering him. It turns out he had just come from a doctor’s visit where he had been given 6 months to live. I was astounded. I was still raw enough in my newfound sobriety that I couldn’t imagine wanting to stay sober if you knew you were going to die soon, what’s the point?
Fear gripped me, would I be able to do that? Then he said the words that have guided my behavior for over twenty years. “John, I didn’t know it, but in the years I’ve been going to meetings, I was in preparation for today.”
There’s an old quote, sometimes attributed to Vince Lombardi, that “Adversity doesn’t build character, it reveals it.” That’s what preparation is all about. If I wait until I’m in the wheelbarrow to pray, those prayers are likely to be ineffective. If I’m a man of prayer at all times and in all circumstances, when I end up in the wheelbarrow my prayers bring comfort and the certainty of a loving God that has my best interests at heart, regardless of the fear that grips me or tells me otherwise. Sudden unforeseen storms can drive me to my knees and I may bend, but I don’t break.
Who you were before you get in the wheelbarrow is who you are when life storms force you into the wheelbarrow, you don’t tap into newfound reservoirs of strength, you survive or fall with the faith you brought with you.
In the space of a single day Job lost all his material possessions and his entire family was killed in a windstorm. How did he respond? Job 1:21-22 “at this, Job got up and tore his robe and shaved his head. Then he fell to the ground in worship and said: “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will depart. The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away; may the name of the LORD be praised.” In all this, Job did not sin by charging God with wrongdoing.”
Really? Job loses everything of value in his life and falls “to the ground in worship”? How do you do that?
Job did not develop this incredible faith in the wheelbarrow, he brought it with him. He was prepared by the life he was living before the life storm washed over him. In Job 1:8 the Lord himself describes Job as a man “blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil.”
Now I’m in no danger of having God declare me blameless, but there’s hope that I can develop a faith that will see me through anything the enemy throws my way, hope that Peter writes about in 2 Peter 1: 4-10 “Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature and escape the corruption in the world caused by evil desires.
For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; and to godliness, brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness, love. For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. But if anyone does not have them, he is nearsighted and blind, and has forgotten that he has been cleansed from his past sins. Therefore, my brothers, be all the more eager to make your calling and election sure. For if you do these things, you will never fall.”
We can add to our faith. I didn’t know you could do that, I thought faith was a finite quantity. What faith you have you were born with. But we have a “great and precious promise” a promise that if we add goodness, knowledge, self-control, perseverance, godliness, brotherly kindness and love to the store of faith we were born with it will increase to the amount necessary to conquer any trials that rage around us. We will not fall.