Frog in the Pool

It was as if he was going down for the last time.  How long he had suffered I could not tell but from the looks of his movements he’d been long at it.

Padding out to the poolside each morning I almost always saw one.  Somehow in the night they had fallen overboard by mistake or perhaps had been lured by the shimmering stars reflected from the crystal sky above.

But then they were there, first to swim with delight and abandon, to dive and float to their tiny heart’s content, only to find that once they’d reached their fill, there was no way out.

The sheer face of the tiled wall leads to a bull-nosed precipice over which they could not jump, swim or crawl.  And so they swam and they swam and they swam unto exhaustion, finally to sprawl ready to sink for the last time to the black depths below.

One avenue of escape arrived with the morning, a woman in flip-flops and moo-moo, possessing a coffee cup and kind heart.

His struggle tug at my compassion for things living and on instinct I ran for the pole and skimmer, hoping against hope that I would not be too late to save him from his watery prison.

Still, as my redeeming net approached from above, he suddenly took on new vigor, dashing with all his might to the bottom of the pool, using every millimeter of his instinct and strength to elude the only help that could free him!

Time after time I dipped in the net with which to scoop him from certain death and equal to my efforts to save, he eluded me.

How often we dance out this same scene with God.  Drawn to the glitter or the gratification of a toy or a desire, we chase a phantom, one that only leads to our damage.

Yet we continue to try to elude God; we resist his net of safety.  Because it means we must trade our will for his, we choose to keep our rebellion, even if our choice causes such misery.

When we finally give what we call ‘freedom’ up, give in and let go, oddly enough it turns out we don’t lose anything we don’t need to.  We become freer than we were, on a new plane, our eyes open to the reality that the pond was the chain that pulled us down.  The freedom to do it our way leads to death, the bow to obedience leads to life.

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