Scratching At Life

One morning I was sitting on my couch having a quiet moment before God. My couch was my “prayer closet” at the time, and I was praying and reading about Him. It wasn’t too long after I sat down that I began to hear noises in the corner of the room … scratching. The sound of scratching got louder and louder. The house I lived in at the time was built on a pier and beam foundation, and it had crawl-space access to the underneath of the house. Hearing that scratching, I remembered that I had forgotten to fix the screen that covered the hole accessing the crawl space. I realized that some sort of animal had probably gotten under the house through that hole, and it was doubtless trying to scratch its way to who knows where.

Strange how our minds work, but at that point I began to wonder where that animal thought it was going. It didn’t have to scratch its way through anything to get somewhere. To get wherever it wanted to go, or any place else in the whole wide world, all it had to do was to go back through the same hole it came through to get underneath the house in the first place … which was probably that unfixed opening … and it would have all the freedom it was seeking. No struggle, just walk through. It reminded me of something I once heard about a fly being trapped in a glass. It has been said that a fly will buzz around that glass until it dies, without realizing that liberty is only as far away as the top of the open container.

Aren’t we like that? How much do we “scratch” at life, going nowhere, when freedom is right there, just waiting for us to find it? Our moments of refreshing could be closer than we realize because God is closer than we realize.

Those are my thoughts ... what are yours?
Jane Harber, author of Here...Have a Miracle