Ellie, the Playland and Grasshoppers

If, for some inexplicable reason, I go to hell, I imagine it will look a lot like the Atwater McDonald’s Playland I spent a week in last Wednesday. The only thing the Playland was missing was flames. There was plenty of weeping and gnashing of teeth, mostly by me.

At one point my granddaughter, Ellie, looked at the highest tower of hell, I mean the top of the Playland and said, “It’s too high for me to go up there. I’m too small.”

She had a point. The Playland did go pretty high, and she is pretty small. I’ve never heard her be afraid, though. I wasn’t sure her afraid even worked. Evidently it does, at least in the seventh level of the pit of hell in Atwater.

I tried to reassure her, “You’re tough, Ellie, you can go up there.”

“No, Grandpa, it’s too high, and I’m just little.”

I nodded my head and tried to ignore the pained cries of the children who were trapped in hell with me. Then I realized, they weren’t pained cries, they were shouts of derision and ridicule, all aimed at me. “Let’s make the fat, bald guy suffer” some kid said. I think I heard that, anyway…

Ellie eventually got up the courage to go up to the top of the tower, although in fairness I should point out that she crawled on her knees while she was up there. She was up there, nonetheless. She overcame her fear and was able to ascend to the top of the tower so she could slide her way down to the lower levels of hell, I mean the Playland.

As Lanette and I chuckled about Ellie I was reminded of some other guys who didn’t think they could do something. In Numbers 13 Moses sent out a scout team to look at the land that God had given them. The scout team went out, and saw amazing things. Numbers 13:23 says, “they cut down a branch with a single cluster of grapes so large that it took two of them to carry it on a pole between them!” It truly was an amazing land that God had placed before them and promised to them.

After 40 days of scouting and grape eating, they returned back to Moses and gave him the report. The land was just as advertised. It was lush, it was fertile, and it could be theirs. It could be theirs, except for one little problem. The people who lived there. “But the people living there are powerful, and their towns are large and fortified. We even saw giants there, the descendants of Anak!” (Numbers 13:28)

Mind you, these are people who had seen God drown all of Pharaoh’s army. They got fed by bread that literally fell from the sky. They saw water shoot out of a rock, for crying out loud! Caleb had a different feeling, “‘Let’s go at once to take the land,’ he said. ‘We can certainly conquer it!’” Numbers 13:30

The other scouts wanted nothing to do with it, “All the people we saw were huge… Next to them we felt like grasshoppers, and that’s what they thought, too!” (Numbers 13:32-33)

They saw the enormity of the task, and they shied away. They felt their own inadequacies, and they shrank away from God’s task. God had given them the promised land, and they let their fear rob them of it.

How often has fear robbed you of victory? How often have you had a chance to do something great, but then felt your own limits and shrank from it? Have you forgotten God is on your side? Have you so quickly turned your back on the incredible blessings he has already given you? Get back in the fight! You’re not in this alone, God is right there with you. You just have to decide to trust him.

No grasshoppers here… Jerry