LIMPING TO ZION
I had the pleasure of going for several prayer walks with my lovely wife during our recent vacation at her parent's cottage in the Huntsville area of Ontario.
Usually, when you think of a prayer walk, you think of a pleasurable, meandering stroll intertwined with stints of stopping to smell the roses. Our prayer walks were a little more determined, if not downright military.
The reason for this rank n' file, double-time marching approach to communing with God had more to do with the bugs than taking the "Lord's Army" metaphor to heart. You see, part of the walk consisted of a narrow lane through a heavily wooded area - thus the bugs. The mosquitoes really weren't the issue so much as the horseflies. I have no love for mosquitoes, but in comparison to horseflies they are minor league louses. A bit of bug spray and some appropriate clothing and the problem is manageable, but horseflies have the nauseating persistence of a tele-marketer.
Horseflies, unlike mosquitoes, don't have the common decency of just trying to land and sup. No, before they want to eat, they prefer to make their presence known by dive bombing your head and circling your body like a shark that smells blood. They attempt to suck the will to live out of your body before they grub down on their pound of flesh.
Now, I don't know about you, but my powers of concentration and self-control are severely hampered under such air raid conditions. I find it difficult to do battle in the Spirit when I am swatting and slapping and screaming in frustration. So, for this reason alone, we try to keep the pace up on our prayer marches.
I give you all this buggy background to frame one particular walk. Early on in this mixture of prayer and marching and swatting, a small rock jumped into the back of my shoe. I almost wonder if the ants weren't strategizing with the horseflies to bring our convoy to a screeching stop. Regardless, there it was, a small rock digging into my heel with considerable crankiness. The pain was quite impressive! On the up side, the irritation of my heel distracted me from the dive-bombing horseflies!
I had a decision to make. Was I going to stop and take my shoe off and cast out the offending pebble or was I just going to suffer? Well, I didn't want to give the horseflies the satisfaction, so I keep up the pace and did my best to ignore the blatantly unignorable.
Then, just when I was about to give in and stop, a miracle happened. The pebble shifted and fell to the bottom of my shoe. Now it was grinding into the heel of my foot and my full and considerable weight pressed against it with every step I took. You would think that would make things worse, but interestingly enough, I could barely feel it! Why? Because, unlike the soft, ivory, baby-butt skin at the back of my heel, the bottom of my heel is heavily callused. It isn't anywhere near as sensitive as the back of my heel.
As I walked and prayed, a spiritual application occurred to me. If you walk with impurity in your life long enough, you'll learn how to deal with the irritation and then finally the irritation will stop as your heart grows callused.
The rest of my walk was spent considering how I had allowed sinful irritations to build up calluses on my soul and I thought about how difficult it is to be sensitive to God when we refuse to stop and deal with the impurity that affects our walk. A close walk with God can only happen if we keep our hearts' clean.
The equation goes something like this: insensitivity to impurity equals insensitivity to God. If the sin in your life doesn't irritate you as much as it once did, it's a sure bet that you aren't as sensitive to God's leading as you once were. Maybe that's why God has to sometimes use pain to get through the calluses, you think? I'll take pain over comfortable calluses any day, what about you?
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