Lessons By The River

I'm currently listening to a song called "Poor Man's Son" by Noah Gundersen, and certain lyrics in the song reminded me of a powerful short story I read by Flannery O'Connor. The lyrics say, "Oh brothers, let's go down, down in the river to pray". In this story by O'Connor, entitled "The River", a young boy interprets a preacher's words wrong by believing that to get to Heaven, he has to swim to the bottom of the river. The boy tries to go down farther and farther, but he's eventually pulled down, and drowns. It's funny how words are interpreted in a wrong way, leading to an injury, or in the story's case, death. It's hard to know what's true when there's so much to believe, and sometimes it seems like the only way to understand something is to trust your own judgement or make something up that sounds reasonable. Human reason fails to suffice though, as we are imperfect and can't always see the larger picture. I believe we need to trust that God knows what He's doing and learn to ask Him if we don't understand something. The little boy in the story may not have died if he asked someone what the preacher was trying to say, instead of taking matters into his own hands. We need to slow things down, knowing that God has a bigger picture in mind. The cool thing with this is that God will always respond. It may not be immediately, or the way we'd want, but He listens and answers. He is constantly teaching us new things, and we just need to open our eyes to see what those things are.

The End.