Recently I have been forced to make some very difficult choices. I have made many life changing decisions since I have had interest in changing my life, but in hind-sight, they haven’t felt this big…this important…this difficult.
As a father who has spent most of his child’s life making self serving decisions, while trying not to injure his child, it’s not easy to now make decisions regarding my child’s well being without seeing how he’s been harmed in the past. This is torture for me. I wake up and breathe and think only of him for the most part. I do think of myself, I’m not G-d. I am a human, but I am a human who has been taught to see where I can be of service to others. My son, who has gotten a raw deal for most of his life, seems to always come before anyone else. Including myself.
So when issues come up, that I allow to become problems, and my son is in the middle of these issues that are now problems, they seem big. They consume my every thought. Every move I make throughout the day seems to be secondary to the problem of the day. When the whole day revolves around the problem, how can I be of service? Am I truly trusting G-d? Then the problem carries over to the next day, and the next, and the next.
I got off of work the other night, and went to hang out with some of my friends from work. I had to follow them in my car because I live in a fairly new area to me. I would’ve been lost if I didn’t follow them close. While driving, I felt a pebble in my left shoe. I quickly tried to maneuver my foot around to get the pebble to the side…but it didn’t work. I tried to reach down and get it out with my hand, but I was following someone, and couldn’t pay attention to both. The pebble was becoming more and more uncomfortable as I drove. I would try to speed up so that I could buy some time and just coast my car, since it’s a stick shift, then maybe I could take my shoe off, and get the pebble out quickly before I needed to push in my clutch again. It wasn’t working. I tried to sit longer at stop signs, but then I wasn’t keeping up with the car I was following. This pebble was beginning to get more and more bothersome.
When I finally got to the destination after frantically trying to get this pebble, which felt like it was the size of a boulder by now out of my shoe, I got it out. I looked at it.
It wasn’t even the size of a grain of rice.
I smiled. I laughed to myself. My problems can seem so big when I am in the middle of them. When I am trying to control the problem, knowing full well that my primary purpose is to be of service, to remain G-d reliant, problems seem huge. And what I should be doing, is allowing Him to handle the problems I can’t control. I was so consumed with this rice sized pebble in my shoe the other night, I paid no attention to where I was going. I couldn’t begin to tell you how I got from point A to point B. Only to find out later, that this very cumbersome pebble was the teeniest, tiniest, little thing ever.
I need to trust G-d. I need to always remember that He will handle the things I can’t. I need to stay focused on the task at hand. Or I will be lost, and I will repeat the same mistakes I always have. And worst of all, I will not fully be there for my son.