Don't miss the wheelbarrows

 

There's an old story that comes out of Communist Russia.  Each day at quitting time, in all the factories, the guards would check all the workers to make sure that they weren't stealing anything.  Night after night, as Ivan left the factory, he would be frisked, have his wheelbarrow examined, and then told to leave.  After several months of this procedure, one of the guards called him aside one night after everyone else had left and said:  "I know that you’re stealing something, but I can never find it.  It's driving me crazy.  Please, you can trust me.  Tell me and I won't tell anyone.  What are you stealing?"  Ivan simply responded:  "Wheelbarrows."

So often we, too, miss the obvious.  Through a series of eight questions in Mark’s gospel, Jesus taught that we often miss the obvious and misunderstand Him, as the Pharisees did.  In this scene, the disciples weren't really listening to Jesus.  They were only thinking that they had forgotten the bread:  they were going to go hungry [Mark 8:14-21].

Jesus very gently chided them for their self-absorption.  He reminded them that twice He had fed crowds of thousands with just a handful of loaves and fishes.  And that they, the disciples, had personally collected many baskets of leftovers [Mark 8:1–10; 6:31–44].  He then asked a question here that he would ask again several times throughout the gospels: "You still don't understand?"  In other words:  "Hasn't experience taught you that you need not worry about things like this, if you are with me?"  That's the secret:  to remember Who is with us--always.  And to see what God has done for us, how we have risen time and time again from the ashes of defeat and discouragement, of illness and loneliness, of sin--the list could be endless.

May we live each day with the eyes of faith, seeing the blessings that have been ours from our first birth breath until this moment.

"Dear Lord, grant us the grace each day to compose a litany of gratitude for all that we have and for all that we are.  And help us not to miss the 'wheelbarrows' of our lives."  Amen.