The Balance of Life

The Balance of Life

Pulled by six plodding oxen, a Conestoga traveled through God’s creation. Life grasped the reins of good intentions and struggled to keep the wagon on the straight and narrow. His destination? The golden-gates of Paradise.

However, Life’s good intentions paled in contrast to his baggage thrown into every niche and nook inside the Conestoga. Not balanced, whenever a wheel slipped into a rut the baggage would almost topple and engulf Life. However, the canvas covering the wagon restrained the baggage, and the wagon continued its journey.

Life would sometimes maneuver around the wreckage of a buckboard, which encountered one of the storms that rage on the road to Paradise. The deep tracks behind the devastation testified that a struggle ensued between the storm and those on the buckboard. The tempest powered the buckboard off the road and ended its pilgrimage. The outward slant of its wheels showed the weight of the baggage it carried contributed to its collapse.

In contrast, trust and faith illumed the pathway for Life's Conestoga’s, and his map never digressed. The spiritually-lighted corridor never changed; its diagram plain and simple. It included no frills of false advertising to confuse its solitary purpose, which was to guide Life to Paradise.

The wreckage reminded Life of his own vulnerability. So, he reminded himself what the diagram of the path to Paradise decreed to him. It was in his heart for moments like this:

Two-thousand years ago the circuit to Paradise received power from a God-man on a cross at Calvary. On that cross, the man Jesus, the Son of God, declared victory when He said “It is finished,” Jn. 19:30. His chin then rested on His chest in death. However, three days later, on the “first day of the week,” Matt. 28: 1-8, Jesus conquered death when he arose from the dead. His resurrection completed His directory to Paradise.     

Life recalled the simplicity of that guide. Jesus said His yoke is easy, Matt. 11:30. He bore that out with an absolute two-part commandment: “And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. This is the first commandment. And the second, like it, is this: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these.” Mark 12: 29-31

Life shuddered; he turned and glanced at the bags of failures in his Conestoga. “What if they fall?” However, like a blanket from heaven, security covered that thought. With love in his eyes, Life looked at the canvas surrounding the Conestoga. Like the canvas around Life’s Conestoga, Jesus Christ is the covering that balances life.

The devastated and desolate buckboard on the road had no such covering,  

Scripture is from the NKJV