Written by Pastor Jack Wellman– Henry Ward Beecher
Easiest is not Always Best
We as humans want to take the easiest route or do things as easily as possible, but the truth is, the greatest accomplishments are never easy, otherwise everyone would doing them…and they’d not be “great” anymore, so the easiest way can sometimes become the hardest way. A good example took place a few years ago when our neighbors who hired the cheapest landscaper they could find. When he had leveled the front of their yard, he had inadvertently chopped off the top of one of our sprinkler heads in our yard. The man was not bonded, and our neighbors didn’t have the money to replace it. We suffered because they took the easiest route, but their “easy” was hard on us.
Swimming Upstream
If trout refused to swim upstream against the current, they’d all die out, but God has placed a fighting instinct in these fish where they give 100% of their effort to make it upstream. If they don’t, they don’t reproduce, and if they don’t reproduce, they won’t be around very long. If the trout just spawned and laid eggs downstream, the newly born trout would simply go out into a lake or into the ocean and not be able to reproduce, or they’d be eaten by downstream predators, so even though it’ harder for the trout to fight the upstream current, taking the easy way out would prove fatal. Any old dead fish can float downstream, but it takes a living one to go upstream.
The Road to Life
Jesus never promised that life will be easier once we trust in Christ. The truth is it’s gotten harder for me and a lot of other believer’s I know, and it is just as Jesus said, “the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few” (Matt 7:14). Here is where you don’t want to take the easy way, because “wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and many enter through it” (Matt 7:14).
Conclusion
We never use our sprinkler system anyway so we didn’t want our neighbors to worry about the sheared sprinkler head in our yard. It’s okay. It was installed before we bought our house anyway, but as our neighbors proved, the cheapest is not always the best and neither is the easiest way the best the best way…in fact, most of the time, the easiest way ends up being the hardest, but even if it’s hardest way, it makes it easier in the long run.
