I stood there taking in the sights and sounds: the water as it gently
lapped the bank, the playful twitter of what I could only assume were
birds of some sort as I couldn't see anything through the dense foliage,
the tall - monstrously tall - trees, thick with leaves of deep green, gold, red, orange, and purple (I swear - purple leaves!).
How had he done that? How had Mr. Throgmorgenson transported me here?
This island shouldn't exist anymore. The Naterans took care of that
hundreds of years ago, and yet here I am. I'm not complaining. I mean,
this is amazing. Awesome. I scanned the landscape, but it was impossible
to see anything through the pack of trees that stood at attention like a
massive army. The center of the island could be mountains, or valleys, a
huge crater, or maybe marshes, it could be forest all the way through
to the other side. There was only one way to find out. I headed inland,
but just as I began to walk, enjoying the peace and the time to think, I
heard the scream. It stopped me cold in my tracks. "Sam?" I whispered and began to run in the direction of that blood-curdling sound.
“Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." Matthew 18:3 Become like little children? Really? Children are definitely cute and innocent, but that pretty much covers the positive qualities. On the negative side, however, the list is quite a bit lengthier: demanding, dependent, self-centered, messy, often smelly, expensive, and embarrassingly honest. So why? WHY in the world would Jesus tell us to become like little children? WHY in the world would He want that? What was He thinking?! Well, He was a thirty-something year-old bachelor. Maybe He didn't really know what He was talking about when He said that. I mean, if we come to Him like little children, it's pretty much guaranteed to be messy. We're likely to be crabby, cranky. We might be downright angry. Prayer-ADD is hard to control on a good day. If we're not on top of it, if we don't have our list in front of us to focus our thoughts, we...
Dang... don't leave us hanging like that! Was it really Sam? What was wrong? Was it as bad as she feared?
ReplyDeleteI MUST KNOW!!!
;-)