During summer’s heat, if you don’t mind getting your feet wet you’ve likely stood at least one time in a gentle stream and allowed the cool running water to casually flow over and around your feet and lower legs.
There where the current is mild with water tickling your ankles and calves as it envelops you, encasing you, embracing you, you notice how much a part of the stream itself you feel—the gentle force—the liquid intensity wrapping around your legs, tugging at you to let go and become one with the water’s perpetual flow.
On our land in Missouri we had such a stream that wove through the bottom land along the hay field and grazing pasture where the cattle would spend their hottest days standing in that stream to cool down. The only time it ever rose to four-foot bank height was during flash flood deluges, so for most days it was more trickle than torrent.
But the ‘stream’ itself is what I’m referring to now. “THE STREAM” is the steam of LIFE—the ebb and flow of life itself as you move along with it or stand strongly against it until it forces you back into the flow. You can’t escape it because it is the force of LIFE evolving in ceaseless waves of energy. You can either ride the flow or you can struggle against it until it overpowers you. Those are your choices.
Sometimes the stream is gentle and soothing, and sometimes it is powerful and overwhelming; but it is always the ‘stream of LIFE’ with all its variety and voracious appetites. When you ‘go with LIFE’s flow’ you ride life’s currents wherever they may take you: bumping and tumbling over boulders in your path and being swept around craggy cliff faces.
When you buck LIFE’s flow, you set your feet as firmly as you can wherever you currently are, and strain to maintain your footing while the water’s volume and strength increases until it rises high enough to lift you up and away. From there your choices are minimal, and the likelihood of escaping the current’s grasp is practically nil unless an outside force plucks you from the water—a limb, a rocky outcrop, an extending sandbar, or a generous stranger.
So as you now stand in that gentle stream hopefully you learn to recognize the stream’s future potential even as it slowly trickles around your tired calves—don’t underestimate the stream’s latent power and how quickly the water can rise with unseen, upstream rain. Respect the stream’s changeability and propensity to alter your personal future plans, no matter how carefully you might have set them, because that’s what happens to those who try to stand against LIFE’s natural flow—it upends you.
Or you can simply ignore the increasing pressure of those rising waters—so sure of your own abilities to withstand the pounding current and the growing depth that make wading through the stream more difficult, because after all, it’s only a steam.
Good luck with that thought.
FINDING YOUR TRUTH 