One of my best friends was telling me a story that her dad often told her when she was young:
There once was a man that was drowning in the middle of sea. He could see no land in any direction. So as he tried his best to keep treading and holding on to life, he prayed to God for help. ‘God, please help me out of this situation or I will die!’ As he kept treading, he bumped into a log large enough for him to hold onto so that he could rest and swim back to shore with ease. The man, however, did not use the log because he was waiting for God to come and save him, and so the log floated away. He continued to pray for God’s help and shortly after, a boat came by and offered to take the young man to shore, but the man refused saying ‘Thank you for your offer, but I am waiting for God to help me’. The boat went away and the man continued to pray, ‘God, please hurry or I will drown!’ After some time, a helicopter flew by and the passengers asked the drowning man if he wanted to climb onto the helicopter. The man refused, yet again, saying that he was waiting for God to help him.
Unfortunately, the man grew more and more tired and could no longer tread to keep himself alive. Once he arrived in heaven, he asked God, ‘Why didn’t you save me, God? I prayed so much for your help as I was treading to keep myself alive, but you never came!’
God responded, ‘I sent you the floating log, but you didn’t use it. Then, I sent the people on the boat and the helicopter to where you were and you refused their help! What more could I have done?’
The message in this story is that when we ask for help, not just from God, our solution may come to us almost immediately. It is up to us to be able to notice the solution. If we are only looking for the one solution to the problem, even if countless other solutions appear in front of us, we may not see them. The idea is to keep our eyes and our mind open to different possibilities. Sometimes the solution is not as easy to find as was the log or the boat that came by, but it can be said that the solution to a problem arises almost as soon as the problem does. Is this a practical way of thought or does it sound fantastic and unrealistic?
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