Lord,
All of us are a little like the Samaritan woman at the well.  
We have sins and failure in our past,
a closet full of skeletons
which rattle from time to time, threatening to get   
and spoil our good image.  
For many of us it’s not just the skeletons either,
but real live boogie men.

For the most part,
we keep them tightly suppressed,
but from time to time they escape,
terrorizing our families,
and reducing us to guilt and confusion.
I hate and fear
the boogie man inside of me.
The egomaniac who talks too much.
The proud presumptuous me.
The critical, cutting me.
The carnal man, my feet of clay.
The pseudo-spiritual me.

The Samaritan woman found release
when You told her
everything she had done.
Does this mean blackmailing
boogie men cannot survive
in the light of Your
loving acceptance?
If it does, then tell me, tell us,
everything we’ve ever done.
Show us the futility of pretending
and protesting our innocence.
Give us the courage to own up,
and in this owning up,
let us find forgiveness and freedom.

Amen

Behind the scenes of an Arizona circus, Bob Biehl started chatting with a man who trains animals for Hollywood movies:  “How is it that you can stake down a ten-ton elephant with the same size stake that you use for this little fellow?”  I asked, pointing to a baby elephant who weighed three hundred pounds.

“’It’s easy…’the trainer said.  ‘When they’re babies, we stake them down.  They try to tug away from the stake maybe ten thousand times before they realize that they can’t possibly get away.  At that point, their ‘elephant memory’ takes over and they remember for the rest of their lives that they can’t get away from the stake.’”

Humans are sometimes like elephants.  When we are teenagers, some unthinking, insensitive, unwise person says, “He; not very good at planning,” or “She’s not a leader,” or “Their team will never make it,” and zap, that mental stake is driven into our minds.  Often when we become mature adults, we are still held back by some inaccurate one-sentence ‘stake’ put in our minds when we were young.

Today you are an adult capable of much more than you realize.  You are far more capable than you were even twelve months ago, and next year you will be able to do things you can’t imagine doing today.

Don’t let a little stake tell you anything else!

I am blessed to be part of a church filled with both experienced leaders and developing leaders.  People who serve their Lord and this congregation help in making our church a good place to belong.