Ups and Downs...

Since Motivational Monday was a holiday, I decided to offer a thought-provoking Tuesday message instead.

Have you ever watched a movie where someone has been kidnapped or maybe his/her home or village is under attack and the main character is hiding but knows he/she will soon be discovered? For some reason, the victim never seems to escape without being noticed. It always seems like they are almost in the clear and then the captor notices something weird like a door slightly ajar or movement in the trees and all hell breaks loose. The victim runs for his/her life with half an army in hot pursuit. It’s very obvious that the main story line is that Point A equals danger and Point B equals safety and it’s the one and only focus of the victim to get from point A to point B without getting captured. The victim runs for hours or maybe even days, through horrible conditions and treacherous terrain. Always they want to stop for awhile, they just want to rest for a few minutes. They have been running for hours and surely they’ve put enough distance between themselves and the dangerous point A that it’s okay to relax a little…let their guards down a little….right? Of course not. The dangerous point A isn’t a fixed point. It isn’t the building that they escaped from that’s dangerous. It’s the people in it and those people are chasing them. Those people have been running for hours too and might just be a few hundred yards behind the victim. The escapee isn’t running from danger, they brought it with them.

 
At first it seems like the moral of the whole story is to get from point A to point B, from danger to safety, but the real moral is simpler than that. It’s just to get to point B. The goal is to get to safety—don’t look back, don’t quit and don’t stop to rest—just keep moving until you’ve reached safety.

I know what you’re thinking….what does this have to do with a thought provoking Tuesday? Well, it seems we have the same goal in life, just as in the movies. We find ourselves hunkered down, hiding from someone or something we don’t want to face but eventually we recognize that we’ve got to move—got to change the situation because we can’t hide anymore so we run. We find a way to change our lives—we stick our necks out—we try something new and different and at first it feels so liberating. We feel free for the first time in a long time but before we know it, it doesn’t feel so liberating anymore. Actually it’s exhausting. Our legs are so tired. We’ve run and run and run. So all we want to do is sit down for awhile and rest. Point A is far off in the distance so it’s safe to stop and breathe for a minute. We just want to coast—just take a break and relax--- nothing wrong with that right? But when we least expect it, something jumps up and reminds us that the goal wasn’t to get away from point A, it was to get to point B. Something or someone lets us know that we aren’t “there” yet and resting on our laurels isn’t getting us any closer to our goal—to the reason we ran in the first place.

And so we stand up. Tired, bruised and bloodied, we stand up and we start moving. Our legs feel like jelly as first, the muscles quivering with exhaustion and threatening to cramp, but still we move. Soon our muscles are warmed up and we can move a little faster, maybe then jog or run. More distance is added between us and the dreaded point A as we move toward our goal—toward safety. Several times we may find ourselves too tired to go on but each time we have a choice to make. Keep moving forward or risk getting caught. Assuming we have the fortitude to go on, we eventually find ourselves within the safety of point B, reflecting on our journey and our desire to stop several times. Hindsight shows us why we couldn’t stop. Escaping point A without making it to the safety of point B would guarantee us that we’d forever be longing for point B and looking over our shoulders for the captors from point A.  Stopping in mid-journey is simply exchanging one prison for another.