Lift and Move

Better to say little and do a lot, then say a lot and do little.

Before we turn the page on winter allow me to relay one last cold weather story. 

One bitterly cold winter morning, when I was about eighteen and attending a Bible School located in the Adirondacks of New York; my whole dorm was awakened by a hysterical roommate. Unbeknownst to me, I was about to learn a very valuable lesson.

As fate would have it, this roommate was the sound man for our meeting hall and when he went to open the back door of the hall he couldn’t get in. To his absolute horror, he had just discovered that all the entries were blocked from the inside by heavy, stackable wooden benches. Panic began to set in because in a few hours the entire campus would need to get in to participate in classes. 

Quite frankly it was a well-designed prank for the ages. The manner in which the unknown culprits kept us out was ingenious as they piled all the benches on top of one another creating a virtual wall. Then somehow, one of them, with the size and agility of a monkey, crawled up over the last bench and closed the door.

Faced with a major dilemma one of our dorm supervisors concocted a brilliant plan. If we pulled together, putting our anger and frustration to work, we could put the meeting hall back together in less than an hour. That way we could still make breakfast and no one would be any the wiser.  His thought was that if we acted quickly setting things right the other students would never find out about it and the pranksters would lose. The lack of a reaction would be our victory.

Fortunately, we had a few monkeys in our dorm as well and they were able to get up over the wall of benches and eventually remove some layers so the rest of us could climb up and over.  Once inside, the plan worked flawlessly as we all seemed to work together not complaining, hustling, lifting and moving. In about half hour the meeting hall was restored back to normalcy, like nothing had ever happened.

To the best of my knowledge no one ever found out who pranked our school. However, there was quiet satisfaction among those of us who knew the truth in knowing tragedy had been averted.  In essence, we turned the tables, aka the benches, on the pranksters.

Since I led with a cold weather story, now I would like to share a spring related one, more befitting of the weather. While at that same school later that same year, Steve, a fellow student who hailed from the Bronx, told me an interesting lesson he had learned thanks in part to a tree stump.

As the story goes Steve was clearing some brush for a friend, which required that he push a heavily loaded wheel barrow uphill on a narrow path. However, much to his chagrin, he was running into an unavoidable problem, which was a pesky tree stump, that was smack dab in the middle of the path. Every time he would make his trek he inevitably would hit the stump which would make his load capsize causing him to get furious. Try as he might the path always lead him to the same point where he would meet disaster.

If memory serves, eventually he bit the bullet and just applied the principle of lift and move and tore the stump out.  He was done talking about the problem and the situation needed to be resolved.  Further stated, no amount of talk would fix it, only delay the process.

To close things out, here is one last story. It comes from the Bible about Jesus. In the book of Luke there is a great story about a man who is paralyzed and what his friends did to help him.

Jesus, who was known for his healing many people who had been blind, deaf, mute, demon possessed or just beyond human help for their ailment, was in town.  He was teaching inside someone’s home and people from all over the country side crowded in to hear what he had to say. Since the paralyzed man could not walk it was impossible to get their friend though the mass of people in his condition. However, these men were going to stop at nothing till they got their friend to the only one who could truly give him the help he so badly needed.

I can only imagine how many times people had tried to comfort the paralytic man by telling him how sorry they felt for him. They may have even wished they could help, but then did nothing.  His friends on the other hand were men of action. They were not going to let a crowd, a full house and a roof stop them. So, without a moment to lose, they tore off the roof and attached ropes to his mat and lowered him down through the ceiling.

Seeemingly Jesus was so taken by this act of faith and persistence that these men displayed that he promptly healed the paralyzed man. The Bible says immediately the once paralyzed man got up, picked up his mat and walked home. When the man’s friends applied the principle of lift and move Jesus obliged and granted their request of a miracle.

In life, just like in the stories above, hard work and persistence tend to pay off more times than not.  So, when it comes time to take action, you better be lifting and moving.

You get what you pay for.in life, for example: talk is cheap and hard work is its own reward.

Swavel