Your Wheel Barrel

I have spent a lot of time sitting behind my house the past few weeks.  It is a great quiet place to reflect about the journey I have been on, but more importantly it gets a lot of sunlight, so it is warm. :)  While sitting there, a lot of people pass by with their wheel barrels.  A wheel barrel is a very important tool in Lesotho.  With it you can carry a lot of things including your water jugs.  Since the well is right by BG, most of the time the wheel barrels are full of any type of container that will hold water so it can be transported from the well to the person's house.  Today, there was a young man whose wheel barrel was very old and very well used.  It had a big bag of Maze Meal, some cabbages and 2 containers of water.  About 20 minutes after he walked past, he came back again, to get more water.  I thought about how easy it would be to just get a bigger wheel barrel, then he would not have to make so many trips.  But then I wondered if the wheel barrel was bigger could he handle the added weight it could carry.

In life we all have wheel barrels.  We put many things in our wheel barrels that we need and some that we don't.  As we journey through life, our wheel barrels may become very full and we may see someone next to us with a bigger wheel barrel and think how easy it may be for them, because their wheel barrel seems to be able to carry more.  Sometimes in our wheel barrels we put things that hold us back from getting all the fresh, living water that comes from God our Father.  Sometimes our pride, lust, jealousy and gluttony take up too much space and we don't get as much of the living water that we need.  When this happens, we become weak and find it hard to function.  Lesotho is high in altitude, and if you don't drink a lot of water, you will feel the effects of it.  Sometimes in life we loose sight of the fact that we need to fill our wheel barrels with the living water that will never run out and never cause us to feel faint.  We need to surrender the things that are in our wheel barrels that don't need to be there.  We need to focus only on our wheel barrel and the things that God desires for us to have in it. God sees each of our wheel barrels and wants to fill them with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, and self control.  Anything else that is in there is not from God.

Take some time today and look at your wheel barrel.  Does it seem that the journey is heavy?  Does it seem that the journey is too much to handle?  What is in your wheel barrel? Are there things that shouldn't be, if so get ride of them, because you are not experiencing the joy and the life that God has intended you to have.

"Jesus told this simple story, but they had no idea what he was talking about. So he tried again. “I’ll be explicit, then. I am the Gate for the sheep. All those others are up to no good—sheep stealers, every one of them. But the sheep didn’t listen to them. I am the Gate. Anyone who goes through me will be cared for—will freely go in and out, and find pasture. A thief is only there to steal and kill and destroy. I came so they can have real and eternal life, more and better life than they ever dreamed of" (John 10:6-10, The Message).