Praise the Lord for Friction! / Mrs Terri Cannon

Mrs Terri Cannon

Pastor's Wife

Hope Baptist Church 

Bettensdorf, IA

Praise the Lord for Friction! 

If the mountain was smooth, you couldn’t climb it.

I am going to make a confession to you, my friends. You may want to sit down because this is going to be shocking. Are you ready? This is it. Too often, I grumble when I’m talking to my Lord. I have faced some incredible obstacles in my life. We all have had our fair share but sometimes, I think I’ve had WAY more than my fair share and I gripe to God about it.

I know! You are stunned! Take a minute and gather yourself before we go on.

Ok. Whew. If you’re still with me, you must not judge me too harshly. I was doing this the other day. It went something like this, “Lord, why does everything have to be so hard?! Why does it feel like I’m constantly fighting against things? Could something just be smooth without any opposition for once?”

And the Lord answered me. No, He didn’t whisper in my ear. He didn’t impress a great truth upon my heart. He spoke through the sweet 5-year-old granddaughter sitting next me.

Her name is Lesli and she is a kindred science nerd with her Nana (me). She often gives me lectures. Last night, I listened to a 5-minute lecture on punctuation, particularly the exclamation point and its use.

But this day, I’m sitting there silently grumbling and asking God why things just can’t be smooth and Lesli pipes up, “Nana, I need to tell you about friction.” I’m thick-headed and I didn’t make the immediate connection. She continued on, “Friction makes thing hard to do. When you’re walking, friction makes it harder to walk. When you’re moving stuff, friction works against you.” (No kidding, this is what she was saying.) “But Nana, if we didn’t have friction, it would be a terrible world. If we didn’t have friction, we could never go anywhere. It would be like walking on ice in totally smooth shoes. There’s no friction when you do that, but you don’t get anywhere either. Friction is a force that works against us, but we have to have it to get anywhere.”

And she went back to watching KidsTube and I sat there in stunned, humbled silence. “Really, Lord, you’re gonna use my granddaughter to put me in my place? Ok. I get it. You allow friction in my life in order to let me move forward. Let me move where you want me to go, and I’ll embrace the friction.”

Psalm 119:71 “It is good for me that I have been afflicted; that I might learn thy statutes.”