Drop It Off and Leave It There … Surviving the Boomerang Effect

Good morning Hump Day readers. I have a question for you, one that I read from a devotion by Crystal Evans, and it is still swirling in my mind: how often do you tell God you are leaving this in his hands and then before you know it, you take it back?

Life swirls around us and mistakes we make have a nasty habit of coming back around and hitting us again like a boomerang. That’s what happens to us when we give God our concerns and even in the most fervent of prayers we say, “I trust you God, only you can take care of this” but the boomerang of life hits us and we are wrestling with the same concerns and problems!

You can ask, “Cyndy, does this really matter since God is listening and continues to help us anyway?” My answer would be “yes it matters because this is a matter of trust in the God who calls us to trust him with everything.” If you’re like me I want to say with all gusto I trust God with everything, but alas, my humanity gets in the way of total trust, let alone dependence on God. Here’s a story from my past when I was working with youth and drama. I think it will put things in perspective, I know it sure did for the youth as it opened up many questions and we had great dialogue.

The youth put on a sketch in church when our pastor was using the theme of laying down your burdens and leaving them with God. Props: a gunny-sack filled with fake boulders and on each one was written: lying, addiction, gambling, gossip, bitterness, grudge-holding, etc. The story: A traveler encountered a person with the filled gunny-sack which was so heavy he was bent over and could hardly walk. The traveler asked if he could help carry the sack so the fellow put it down and let the helper take each “boulder” out. Once the load was removed the fellow could stand up again and smiled and went on his way, but not very far. Finally he turned around and came back and picked up the load again. The other traveler was puzzled, “why would you want this heavy load again—it’s killing your back?” but the man replied, “I’m kind of used to it and I’m not sure what I’d do without it.” Off he went, leaving the traveler shaking his head mumbling, “get rid of it buddy, it’s gonna’ kill you.” How spot on is that with us when we cannot trust God for our problems?

So, my thought for this Hump Day is “why does this happen — why is trust so hard?” Let’s face it, we have all been let down by trust that has been broken and yes, often we feel God has broken that trust because God didn’t give us what we prayed for. Yet, we know that God does hear our prayers and responds, often giving us much better than we’ve asked for! Again, our finite minds are not happy with some of those changes because we’ve had it all planned the way we want it.

Ah…there is the real crux of the problem! MY way, MY plan, MY ideas—or to put that all together in one easy statement, MY CONTROL. As long as we want to stay “in control” our trust level is going to look more like the gas gauge on a race car roaring around the track at 120MPH! — you run out of gas fast.

So many things invade our lives, anxiety, fear, our constant culture of “you have to have it all or you won’t be complete” – you can add your own experiences. All of these batter away at the faith we say we want to be strong in, and the trust we want to have in God. These life-boomerangs create doubt and it doesn’t take us long to pick up the same issues over and over again.

Perhaps we need a new sentence to interject into our daily prayers: “O Lord, forgive me for picking back up what I’ve already laid at Your feet.”  If we can adopt that like a mantra that sticks in our minds, I think it could be pretty helpful. We all know when mistakes overtake us it’s easy to say, “I’m never going to do that again” and oops, five (or ten) times later we’re doing it again. Maybe we should just say “I never make the same mistake twice, I do it “____ times over!”—at least that would be truthful, right? But God has another idea, look at the Psalm below:

Pile your troubles on God’s shoulders—he’ll carry your load, he’ll help you out.

He’ll never let good people topple into ruin.

-Psalm 55:22 –The Message

If you often find yourself confessing the same old sins and you are tired of the boomerang effect, take an inventory of your heart and soul. Be honest and ask yourself: Am I holding a grudge, harboring un-forgiveness, finding it hard to walk in holiness and purity, going through deep pain and/or sorrow, struggling with addiction, marriage squabbles, out of work, financial setbacks, illness, etc?

All these things can knock the life out of our life…BUT…one thing remains in this give-and-take and that is the fact that our wavering trust and repeated sins will never negate the goodness of God’s mercy and grace. We can stumble, we can fall, but because of the mercy and forgiveness that we have in Jesus, we get back up and we move on and we are strengthened each time to hopefully not repeat ourselves and those mistakes!

Friends, until Jesus takes us home, our struggles are with us, but so is HOPE—and “hope springs eternal” which means, if it is one time or a dozen, we take it all and in repentance, give it to the Lord and do our best to leave it there.

Author and Theologian, Father Alexis, wrote: “Repentance is understood not as mere regret over the past but as a new vision for the future rooted in courageous commitment in the present.”

There is our answer friends! Repentance leads us to new a vision and hope for the future, no matter how many times we fall. All I can say is “How Great IS Our GOD!—AMEN.”

Suggestion: listen to Ray Boltz’s song, The Altar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axZnaf9osWw