What’s more fearsome, more freeze-you-in-your-tracks terrifying, than a giant, nasty-looking snake?
My friend Woody stops and makes friends with snakes, but just about everyone else I know would stop if they saw a big, mean-looking snake in the road. Chris Guillebeau shared a cool story last week. I’ll edit a bit.
One day as he followed his dream a guy looked ahead and saw a rather large snake lying across his path.
Big snake. Big, scary snake, blocking the only route to his dream. So the guy waited, but the snake didn’t move.
No alternate path, and the guy finally realizes his only choice is to approach the snake. Perhaps he can scare it off or at least go around it. As he gets closer, he sees that the snake has been transformed: it’s merely a coil of rope. There is no snake after all!
“This will be a great blog post,” he chuckles to himself as he shivers away his fear.
We might take lessons at different levels from this little parable.
The terror of indecision is usually much worse than moving forward. Most of the things we fear aren’t so bad, once we choose to face them.
At a deeper level, perhaps our fears actually transform when we summon courage to face them. Jesus said, “Take courage. I Am. Don’t be afraid.” I think the idea was that when we take Him seriously, things change.
Most obvious of all: we must start walking because we can’t stand there forever.
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We’re supposed to fear the giant snake, and we’re supposed to allow our fear to stop us from following the dream. We’re supposed to stop, turn back, run away. That’s the enemy’s message most powerful message.
The giant snake might really be a giant snake waiting to devour us, but mostly it’s not. Mostly, when we face it, it turns out to be an old piece of rope.
But no matter, because the dream waits down that path. Jesus says, “Follow me.”
Fear or not, snake or not, we must start walking.