One Saturday morning, I was just finishing my breakfast, planning how I would have fun playing in the creek behind my house. It had a few frogs that leaped around on the rocks, the water was clear, and it was a lot of fun on a warm autumn day.
But just as I was sliding off my chair at the breakfast table, headed for the backyard, my dad said, “Johnny, I need your help today.” Today? I hoped he did not mean the whole day! That would wreck all my plans! But, I knew that children should obey their parents, so I stopped in my tracks and asked what he meant. He told me that he wanted me to start raking the leaves and putting the fallen leaves in bags. We had a huge yard with many huge trees and a lot of leaves, and most of those leaves were on the ground. This seemed like it would take forever.
My dad noticed I was not happy about this and he said, “I promise there will be a prize for you when you are finished. I have the leaf bags on the back porch for you to get started and there are more in the garage.” This was going to take all day and I’d be working near the creek. I’d be able to hear the water, but I couldn’t go
near it.
I started raking. At first, I spilled as many leaves on the ground as I got into the leaf bag, which also kept dumping over and spilling. It felt like I was never going to get this done. But, eventually, I figured out how to work faster and got more leaves in the bag. Soon I had several bags full.
Suddenly, I heard voices! I saw my five cousins running toward me, and they each had rakes! Now the huge job began to be fun as we each took a row and had races to see who could clean up the leaves in their row fastest. We started to sing Sunday school songs we knew as we worked. We admired the golds, reds, oranges and greens in the leaves. God had planned that the green leaves on the trees would turn these beautiful colors and fall to the ground. This happens because the sap in the trees, instead of going up to the leaves and feeding them, starts going down the tree trunks into the ground, to strengthen the roots for the long
winter ahead.
Before long, we had the whole yard raked and the leaves bagged. Just then we saw my dad coming toward us with two huge boxes. He called to us to come help him get more boxes out of his truck. As we started opening the boxes, we were excited to see we were getting a new slide to play on in the backyard! We soon had the slide built and it was big enough for all of us to climb on. This was a wonderful prize! And we really had such a good time together raking the leaves. It felt good to be so happy, but most importantly, the Lord was pleased to see me obeying Dad. The Lord wants us to obey our parents, and as we obey them, we are obeying the Lord as well. I could play in the creek later, but I was so thankful that I had worked happily and gotten such a special reward!
There may be times in your life when you will go through days that seem hard, boring, or maybe even painful. That is when you need to keep living by the faith which obeys God even when it is hard. Hebrews 11 talks about people who trusted God enough to keep on walking with Him, even though they were going through all kinds of problems. Now, all of them are receiving the reward for their obedience. Trust Him, even when it seems hard! He is “a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him” (Hebrews 11:66But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him. (Hebrews 11:6)). God is always good, and His rewards far outweigh what He asks us to do for Him!
Messages of God’s Love 2/21/2021