Stopping the Wheel

It’s got cold last week.  It’s been warmer over the last couple of days, but tomorrow we’re supposed to get some snow, and then it will be cold again.  There’s nothing unusual about that, of course.  Winter comes every single year, and this year will be no exception.  And of course, we haven’t come anywhere close to the cold that we’re likely to get at some point.

It’s interesting, though, how we react to the cold.  I don’t know about you, but every year it comes as a bit of a shock to me to realize just how cold it can get around here.  I know it gets cold, obviously, but what I mean is that every year we get spring, and then summer.  The weather is really nice and I spend as much time as I can outside, enjoying it.  But then, after a while, it seems like people get bored with nice weather.  Some of us actually start looking forward to winter.  We forget what winter is really like around here.  We forget just how cold the cold can be.  And then it gets here, and we start wishing the weather would warm up again.  It seems like we repeat this cycle every single year.

This may seem like a stretch to you, but as I was thinking about this I thought about a cycle we see repeated in the Bible.  The people are struggling, but then God comes along and helps them.  Things get better.  People spend a lot of time with God.  They enjoy how well things are going.  But then, after a while, it seems like the people get bored with all the blessings they get from God.  They start looking forward to other things, ungodly things.  They forget how bad things were before God came and helped them.  And so they leave God, and the bad times come again.  They start wishing God would come back and help them again.  We see this cycle repeated over and over again.

It seems like, for some reason, we human beings tend to be people of the moment.  When things are going well, we think they always will go well, no matter what we do or don’t do.  When things are going badly, we get desperate.  We panic.  We start thinking things we always be the way they are.  We ignore God when things go well, because we think things will continue to go well whether we can on God or not.  We call on God when things go badly, because we don’t see any hope otherwise.  The wheel keeps spinning.  The cycle keeps repeating.

But it doesn’t have to.  We can get off that cycle.  We can stop the wheel.  Let’s spend a lot of time with God, and keep spending a lot of time with God.  Let’s not get bored with all the blessings God as given us.  Let’s focus on the all-knowing, all-loving all-caring God.  Let’s stay with God all the time, no matter how things are going.  We’ll be a lot happier when we do.