The story of the tortoise and the hare has been on my mind quite a bit lately. If you don’t remember your Aesop’s Fables it is alright, I wouldn’t if not for my preschool teaching this week. 🙂 In the story, the tortoise starts the race slowly and the hare bounds off. The hare is so fast that he decides he has plenty of time to nap and then oversleeps, waking up and arriving at the finish line just in time to witness the tortoise win. The tortoise shouldn’t have won. Everything was against him including speed and agility but he didn’t let this effect him. He set out to win the race, and he did. He persevered through crazy odds to win just a race. What would our own lives look like if we persevered to that extent against all odds in everything we did? Would we stop living in shame and sorrow for what could have been?
I feel as though compared to American children, the kids we have been ministering to here could be viewed as tortoises. You could focus on the fact that they are smaller, poorer, sicker, and have less opportunities in just about every arena, including access to God in the way children in the United States do. Yet, we shouldn’t be a hare, simiply giving up on them because they must persevere more to accomplish things in life. God loves them just as much as he loves us. He loves them so much that His one and only Son died for them. It is easy to take one look and simply give up, saying that the odds are impossible. But, didn’t the tortoise also win against all odds? With a bit of perseverence, and most importantly, God, we can accomplish anything in life that we choose.
Today, I encourage you to not only pray for the children we are ministering to, but also for a person in your own life, maybe even yourself, who is facing a battle today against all odds. Ask God to intercede for them and you just might be surprised by the results.
