"IT'S TOO HARD!!!!!!!!"

For several months, this was Caleb's distraught refrain whenever I would ask him to start picking up the toys in the play room. For a while, it just annoyed me because I thought he was purely throwing a fit. But then I began to realize that I do the same thing on an "adult" level because of the way I look at the world. When Caleb looks at the messy play room, he sees all of the scattered toys and feels overwhelmed with the impossibility of picking them all up at once. When I am in the midst of a struggle or trial, my default is to face it in terms of the rest of my life, rather than facing it one day at a time. When I face a change I need to make, I sometimes think with incredulous hopelessness, "God expects me to overcome this weakness for the rest of my life?"

So, in the midst of trying repeatedly to explain to Caleb that he just has to pick up one toy, put it away, and then pick up another one, I have been convicted of my own resistence to doing just that. In the areas of my life where submitting to the Lord's will for the rest of my life seems insurmountable, I just have to remind myself to live obediently TODAY. I cannot follow my Lord next year, next month, or even tomorrow. I can only follow Him today. So now, I am much more patient with Caleb's "I CAN'T! IT'S TOO HARD!!!" than I used to be, and I am quicker to remember that the Lord wants my heart and my obedience in this moment. Nothing beyond is even possible.