Spiritual Solutions

There’s a little song that goes like this:

If you go down to the woods today you’re in for a big surprise;

If you go down to the woods today you’d better go in disguise;

For every bear that ever there was will be there for certain because

Today’s the day the teddy bears have their picnic.

The song, of course, says that if you go down to the woods today you’re in for a big surprise. But sometimes those surprises are not always welcome, and it says “and you’d better go in disguise.”

In mythology, going to the woods is symbolic of going into the darkness, into the unknown. So it says you’d better go in disguise, you can’t really go with your normal everyday self because if you do that then you’ll be fearful of what’s going to happen. All the bears are gathering. You know what happens when the bears gather, in our financial world anyway. A lot of hardship and problems may happen, right?

So the bears are gathering. So we can’t go with our normal consciousness; we have to go with a new awareness. And when we come in a new guise or a new self, with a new heart or a new spirit, then God turns our bears into teddy bears.

So if you’ve got bears in your life, know that they can be turned into teddy bears. Listen to this promise of God in Isaiah 41:

“I will open rivers on the bare heights, and fountains in the midst of the valleys;

I will make the wilderness a pool of water, and the dry lands springs of water.

I will put in the wilderness the cedar, the acacia, the myrtle, and the olive;

I will set in the desert the cypress, the plane and the pine together;

that men may see and know, may consider and understand together,

that the hand of the Lord has done this, the Holy One of Israel has created it.”

This is the realization that, truly, God turns bears into teddy bears; God turns the dry lands into springs of living water.

We must let go of old perceptions, old beliefs, and old limited ways of seeing. We must open our eyes to a new way of seeing.

There’s a story that was in the Associated Press several years ago, around this time of year. It was about some Japanese fishermen in the Sea of Japan. Their boat got hit by a falling cow. This may sound rather unusual, but that’s what happened. It seems that there was an airplane, a transport plane from Russia, flying over the Sea of Japan with some cows they had just picked up in Siberia.

While they were on the trip, the cows became restless – it’s a true story! I don’t know why they became restless, maybe because of the food on the airplane. Anyway, they became restless and they were endangering the airplane. So the crew decided to open the cargo door in the rear of the plane, and the cows stampeded right out of the airplane.

Now you can imagine the chill of the mariner hearing the dreaded “Moo!” of a falling heifer in excess of a hundred miles an hour. And then, boom! It hit the boat, and it sank the boat. The fishermen were saved, but the real tragedy of the story would be if those fishermen did not go back again to fish in the Sea of Japan for fear of being hit again by a falling cow.

Now we all have falling cows in our lives, don’t we? Sometimes they’re in the subconscious mind; sometimes they’re very much in the outer experience too. But if we fear going on with our lives because another falling cow may be coming our way, then we’ll never take any more risks, will we? We’ll never step out again.

Listen to this promise of God:

“I am the Lord; I have called you in righteousness,

I have taken you by the hand and kept you;

I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations,

To open the eyes that are blind, to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon,

from the prison those who sit in darkness.” (Isa. 42:6-7)

That’s quite a promise!

It’s so easy to look at what happened before and say, “I’m never going to get involved in that again, because look what happened!” Instead of this look to God’s promise, that God holds you by the hand and takes you out of the prison consciousness of limitation and brings you into a whole new awareness.

How do you see your world? Do you see it as a friendly world? Or is it a fear-filled world? When you look at your world, what does it feel like to you? Is it filled with danger? Or is it filled with a sense of security and love?

Listen again to God’s promise:

“And I will lead the blind in a way that they know not,

in paths that they have not known I will guide them.

I will turn the darkness before them into light, the rough places into level ground.

These are the things I will do, and I will not forsake them.” (Isa. 42:16)

Even in the difficult times of life, we need a new way of seeing. We need to open our inner eyes and see if we can find a blessing in there just waiting for us to recognize it.

Remember, God is Blessing You Right Now!

Rev. Alan A. Rowbotham

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