Musings of An Eclectic Cowboy
May 20, 2008
Forest or Trees
This past weekend as a family we went to Missouri and Arkansas for a couple of High School Graduations for a couple of nephews. We flew into St. Lewis and drove to Little Rock hitting both graduations in our travels. There were lots of rolling hills with very winding roads. The roads went up and down and left and right so much that after a while I had a hard time figuring out which direction we were going. And it didn’t help to look for the sun because there were so many trees that most of the time we were in the shade. Also those same trees blocked the view of the country side. I knew that the area was absolutely gorgeous but I couldn’t get a good enough look at it to confirm it. So when I got home I went to Google Earth and looked at trip from a bird’s eye view. It gave me a completely different outlook on the area. I could see rivers that were near the road. I could see towns that were just around the bend on a side road. I got a better idea of what the country that I went through was like it was a much broader perspective.
Our lives are full of those same kind of perspectives. There is an old saying that “you can’t see the forest for the trees” that became very apparent to me this last weekend. A lot of times we get bogged down with the little things in life and we don’t get the big picture. We reach for the worldly things out there without considering the eternal consequences of those things. One of the best examples of this that I can think of is when in 2 Samuel David while bringing in the Ark of God to Jerusalem “danced before the Lord with all of his might” and his wife Michal could only look upon David with contempt. David saw the forest with his eternal view but Michal only saw the trees with her worldly view.
If we look at life with an eternal view then we won’t worry about the trees that are out there because we will be able to see the forest in all of its glory.
Vaya Con Dios
The Eclectic Cowboy
Winfield Davenport