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Cheap Substitites
by Jerry Ousley As a teenage boy I got an opportunity to fulfill a dream. I always thought playing the drums would be a neat thing to do. I remember as a child, when we would visit our uncle in Hamilton, Ohio, one of the things everyone enjoyed was when they pulled out their guitars and instruments and had a good time playing music. At that time I couldn't tell an "A" from a "B" on the guitar. I'd wind up grabbing an old coffee can or something and beat it with my hands keeping rhythm with the music. In our home church there was a lot of music. There was one boy about my age that played a snare drum. I'd sit in service and envy that guy (who later became one of my best friends). There came a day when he didn't come to service. There sat his drum, all lonely as if it were longing for someone to beat on it. I said something to someone and before I knew it I was on the platform keeping beat with the music. I loved it. Later, Mom and Dad got me a snare drum of my own for Christmas. It even had a symbol attached to it. I was in heaven! But a year or so later my friend got a whole set of drums. I loved playing the snare but man, I dreamed of what I could do with an entire set! But, alas, it was way out of my parent's budget, so I played my snare as my mouth watered while my friend played his set. He never seemed to play any of the other drums except the snare "What a waste!" I thought. The day came when my friend's mother told me that she had found a set of drums in a yard sale for only $5.00! I thought that my ship had come in and my dreams had come true! It was a Saturday evening and so I quickly got permission to spend the night with my friend and his mother was going to take me to the home hosting the yard sale before church on Sunday morning. I hardly slept that night. Morning did finally come, we got ready, ate breakfast and all the while I fidgeted, watching the clock awaiting the moment when we could go claim my drum set. The hour arrived and we were off. When the people opened the garage to reveal the set, my eyes were wide open. It didn't matter to me if they were scratched up I would fix them. But when the garage door was finally up all I saw was this little toy set of drums you know, the kind you'd see a mechanical monkey playing. My silver-lined cloud burst into a downpour of rain as my smile quickly turned to a frown. What was my friend's mother thinking? I thought of buying the set just to see if there was something I could salvage from it, but if I had, I would have been substituting something that would never work and would be a mere facsimile for the real thing. The day did come when I got a set of drums and I got fairly good on them. But the point is that I was tempted to substitute a toy for the real thing. In a way that's what the young Levite did. In Judges 17 and 18 we read his story. Here was a young man with hopes and dreams of working as a religious minister. The day came when a man named Micah, who lived in the mountainous region of Ephraim, wanted to hire this young man to be his household priest ministering to idols. It was like a toy drum set. It looked like a drum set, but in reality it was only a fake. It was doing what he longed to do, but he would be going through the motions instead of serving the only, one, true God. The young man fell for it and found himself worshipping idols and leading this man's family in the same. Life often tempts us to settle for less. What our heart yearns to do for the Lord, with our lives, looms before us and we are tempted to get as close to it as we can, settling for a compromise. We aren't good at waiting on God. But to really be fulfilled we must wait for God's timing. It's tough. It isn't easy. We get impatient and are tempted to substitute. But don't do it. Wait on God. Let His timing kick in and I promise you, you won't be disappointed beating on a toy drum set with your knees banging up against your chin! Jerry D. Ousley is the author of ?Soul Challenge?, ?Soul Journey?, ?Ordeal?, ?The Spirit Bread Daily Devotional and his first novel ?The Shoe Tree.? Visit our website at spiritbread.com to download these and more completely free of charge. Article Source: http://www.faithwriters.com |