My son Kenny loves trains.
The real ones that go by on the tracks not far from our house, blowing their horns and towing a hundred cars behind five engines? Loves ’em.
Those Brio-compatible ones that he can string together, build tracks for, and have hours of fun with? Loves them too.
Household objects that aren’t even real trains but can be placed one behind the other and pushed across the table to make pretend ones? Yep; loves ’em.
Kenny also loves to have people “play trains” with him, as he put it when he was three. “Mommy? Play trains with Kenny?” he would invite hopefully, his big brown eyes fastened on me as he awaits my answer.
“I’d love to, Kenny,” I usually said.
“Okay,” he would say delightedly, and sit down on the floor with the trains. Sometimes, he had a track already laid out; sometimes, we built one together.
We were doing just that a few months ago. Kenny had several sections of track laid out and hooked together. He also had about eight engines and train cars strung one behind the other (his attach with magnets), and two houses perched across the train tracks so that the trains could pass through the doors of the houses. We were having a good time moving his trains around the track and making train noises.
Sometimes, the beginning of the train was too far away from me for me to reach conveniently, so I would attempt to push the train from behind. There are grooves in the tracks, so I figured that should work.
Some of you already know what I’m going to say because you’ve had the experience: it didn’t work. While pulling a train works just fine, with all the other cars trailing neatly along behind, pushing a train causes some of the cars in the middle to derail. What you end up with is a car or two at the beginning and end still on the track, with everything in the middle in various stages of derailment.
Wow. What a metaphor for how things work in life, isn’t it?
When you do things the way they’re designed to be done (pulling the train), things work out just fine. When you try to force something to operate in a way it was never meant to work (pushing the train), much of it derails.
We know this. We know that some things in life have to be done a certain way if we want to experience success. So why, knowing this, do we push the train instead of pull it?
Sometimes, it would inconvenience us to do things the necessary way. Just as it would have inconvenienced me to have to reach for the front of the train to pull it, sometimes we will be inconvenienced when trying to do the right thing the right way. So we take a shortcut, hoping it will work and save us the extra effort.
Maybe we’re rebelling against having to do things a certain way. We’ve all been there—trying to do things our own way because we simply don’t want to do them someone else’s (God’s?) way.
There could be a thousand other reasons why we try to do things the easy way, even though we know we probably shouldn’t. Maybe, like me, we do things the wrong way (that day wasn’t the first time I had tried to push the train) because we’re hoping we can make it work out right this time so that we can avoid the consequences we’ve gotten every other time.
Sometimes, it’s not a big deal if we try to take a shortcut and it fails. Often, we can simply try again, the way we should have tried the first time, and things work out right, with no harm done. But let’s think about some times when there is harm done—when it does hurt us to try to take shortcuts.
The first one that comes to mind is in our relationship with God. As Christians, we all want to be close to God—or at least we say we do. Yet we act as if we can accomplish an intimate relationship with him by simply going to church and saying the right things—never mind the fact that we don’t study our own Bibles regularly and don’t pray regularly except maybe at mealtimes.
How about our relationship with our husband? Do we do things the right way, giving 100% effort, hoping to grow our marriage that way? Or do we try to take a shortcut—that is, try to effect change by nagging our spouse (which really isn’t a shortcut, because it doesn’t usually work, anyway)?
What about our relationship with our kids? Do we try to take the shortcut to winning our child’s heart of signing them up for classes they want, buying them what they want at Christmas, and sending the most creative, homemade Valentines with them to school for them to give their friends at the party, and believe that that’s sufficient? Or do we put our life’s effort into knowing them—connecting with their precious little spirits?
You know what? I’m glad God doesn’t take shortcuts. In fact, in order to establish an intimate relationship with us, God took the most “long cut” that there was: he became human and came to earth to live with us, eventually being crucified by us on a cross. He couldn’t have put forth any more effort than he did.
So the least we can do is do the same. In other words, as we go through this life he has given us, the least we can do is put all our effort into doing it “right”. I’m not talking about being a perfectionist or about never making mistakes. I’m talking about living life to the best of our ability—not half-heartedly, but wholeheartedly; not taking the easy way out, but putting forth the effort it takes; not skimping on the only thing that really matters (our relationship with God) in order to pursue temporary things that will fade away.
Is there an area in life where you are “pushing the train”? Do you need to start pulling? Ask God to show you. I guarantee that he will.
Proverbs 13:4—The sluggard craves and gets nothing, but the desires of the diligent are fully satisfied.