Gutter Gopher

Monday 5/14/2012 5:01 AM

My regular running route takes me past a prison that was shut down last December.  The lawn along the street is overgrown, with gopher holes dotting the landscape.  Yesterday when I ran I saw a cat crouching by a gopher hole, waiting for his morning meal to emerge.  This morning as I ran past that section of the road I saw a gopher running in the gutter trying to hop up the curb back into the grass but it was too small to reach that high so it was frantically running back and forth.  Evidently it had come out of his hole and then fallen off the curb into the gutter and was now looking for a way back to his hole.  His plight was desperate and he was extremely vulnerable to a prowling cat.

After I passed the distraught gopher I thought about people who are in the same sort of desperate circumstances.  Perhaps they are addicted to drugs or alcohol and recognize that they are in serious difficulty but, no matter how hard they try, they can’t seem to escape from the addiction.  Others may be in abusive or dysfunctional relationships and long for love and acceptance but can’t find it.  Shortly after I had those thoughts Tim McGraw’s song How Bad Do You Want It? came on my iPod.  The chorus of the song contains these lift-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps kind of words: “How bad do you want it?  How bad do you need it?  Are you eatin’, sleepin’, dreamin’ with that one thing on your mind?  How bad do you want it?  How bad do you need it?  ’Cause if you want it all you’ve got to lay it all out on the line.”  Unfortunately, no matter how badly someone may want it, laying it all out on the line and having a singular focus to fix things often has the same result as the gopher trying to jump from the gutter to the curb.

1 Peter 1:13 gives good advice to me today.  “Therefore, with minds that are alert and fully sober, set your hope on the grace to be brought to you when Jesus Christ is revealed at his coming.”  I need to take a realistic look at my circumstances and my plight and then set my hope on the grace of God.  He is the only one who can deliver me from my desperate circumstances.