“I will trust and not be afraid.” Isaiah 12:2

            I read about a man who had noticed a couple of wild ducks on the other side of a barbed wire fence.  They apparently noticed him too and kept an eye on him to see what his intentions might be.  The man had no intention of hurting them but was curious as to how close they would let him get.  Suddenly they rose together, quickly beating their wings for a fast get-away. As they rose swiftly, they continued to look backward to keep an eye on him.  They didn’t however, see the power lines in front of them.  Before he knew it, one of the ducks hit the power line hard and fell to the ground, laying their stunned.

            He got out of his car thinking about climbing over the barbed wire in hopes of helping if he could. The other duck circled back around flying low over the duck on the ground.  Fortunately, the fallen duck soon recovered its senses and gained enough strength to feebly fly off with its mate.  The duck had been so busy looking back at a supposed problem that it ran into a potentially deadly problem.

            You can probably remember a time that may have happened to you as well.  It may be a word of gossip I heard about me through the grapevine and I spend so much time to get all the details of where that came from and trying to prove myself innocent that, without realizing it, I fall into the whirlpool of misunderstanding and I find that my love for the other person has been damaged…perhaps even irreparably. It could be any number of things.  Perhaps it’s the unsettling ‘news of the day’ that can be very upsetting and because we’re so focused on that, the “peace that passes all understanding” is gone.

            In Matthew 14 we read the account of Jesus walking on the water and as Peter gets out and actually walks on the water toward Jesus, Peter’s problem was not the big waves and the wind, it was instead that he was looking in the wrong place – he got his eyes focused on the wrong thing, and therefore he began to sink.

            Are we keeping our eyes on Jesus?  In today’s current events, I find that I have to discipline myself, a number of times a day, to refocus my eyes, heart and thoughts on Jesus.  There’s nothing better that Satan loves than having us look away from Jesus and away from His Word.  If he can get us to do that, he can get us to doubt and worry and lose our peace and perhaps even our joy. We need to come to Jesus.   Jesus Himself says, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.  For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”   Matthew 11:28-30

            Someone once wrote: “Don’t tell God how big your problem is; tell your problem how big God is.”  Sounds like good advice to me.