While thinking of my late mother I remembered a conversation I’d had with her: ‘Bob d’you remember the times Dad carried you, when you walked with him on the hills?”

“Yes, ma,” I’d said.

“You were scared to jump from one rock to another, and Dad used to stoop down, pick you up and step over.”

“It wasn’t just the mountains, Ma,” I’d told her, “It was also at the railway station. I was afraid to go over the footbridge, because the wooden planks which made up the floor had cracks through which I could see the steam engines below, who like evil monsters breathed fire and blew black smoke up through the crevices onto me.

I’d put down the phone and thought of Dad. Of his strong arms that so easily carried and lifted me over places I was scared to step over. My thoughts went to the lovely poem, “Footprints,” in which a man looks back over the years and sees a pair of footprints, which he knows is that of God and himself walking next to each other.

“And what about those foot-prints, which are alone?” he asks God, “Did you leave me then?”

“No,” says God, “that’s when I carried you.”

What a beautiful thought. God carrying us, when we are sick, when we have no strength left in our bodies, when we have given up, when we cling to the edge of a precipice and are frightened by what we see when we look down!

There’s this lovely story of a mother eagle who soaring through the air one day, was startled to see her baby eagle, clinging to the side of it’s nest, struggling to prevent a fall that was sure to crush its body more than a thousand feet below. The mother eagle, with the speed of lightning, swooped low, spread her strong wings to break the fall of her darling and with her precious cargo clinging to the feathers of her mighty wings glided safely to the canyon’s floor.

Carried by its mother’s wings, the little one lived.

So, also is our heavenly Father, waiting to lift us up, and break our fall.

I am sure there are many of us in situations where we are afraid to cross something fearful and difficult.

Wait for God to take you across.

My father is no more there to lift me across the rough patches of hills and rocks and over bridges at stations, but I know the Father he has gone up to be with, has muscles that will continue to effortlessly do the same work.

He is there for you too, to lift you up, and over…!

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