I seek you with all my heart; do not let me stray
from your commands.
—Psalm 119:10
My grandmother grew up on a farm in North
Dakota, and to hear her tales of winters there, it’s no wonder she turned out
to be the spunky, energetic woman she still is at eighty-five. You’d have to
be, I think, or you wouldn’t make it through a North Dakota January.
When blizzards whipped across the treeless
plains, they often resulted in dangerous whiteout conditions. People’s footprints
would disappear entirely after each step, meaning they wouldn’t be able to see
large buildings just feet away. And while for someone like me, such weather
might call for a day of staying inside sipping hot cocoa and cozying up with a
good book, that wasn’t an option for those tough North Dakota dairy farmers.
The animals still had to be fed; the cows still had to be milked. There was no
such thing as a snow day on the farm.
Grandma’s father had heard about neighbors
who had ventured out in the midst of a blizzard and had gotten disoriented in
the blinding snow. Although they were only feet from their home, they had
frozen to death before they could find their way back. So he came up with a solution:
he rigged up a rope that stretched from the house to the farm for those days
when the snowstorms hit. If he had to go outside in the middle of a blizzard,
he’d hold on and not let go until he was safely to the barn.
Sometimes I wonder if he was ever tempted to
let go of the rope and veer slightly off the path on some other errand, or if he
ever got overconfident, thinking he’d done the route so many times in the past
that surely he didn’t need to hang on this time. But according to Grandma, that
never happened. He knew the truth about staying on the path of life: sometimes
the most important thing is knowing when you need help.
When it comes to purity, it’s easy to veer
off track, even when we’re trying not to. Most of us don’t set out to
intentionally spiral downward into moral failure; usually it creeps in ever so subtly.
We take one small step off the path, which leads to another misstep, and
another, until before we know it, we’re in a full-blown blizzard and we can no
longer find our way home. But thankfully, God has given us a lifeline to keep
us going in the right direction: his Word. As the psalmist put it, “Do not let me stray from
your commands.”
Our job is to hang on to that rope with both
hands, recognizing that we can’t remain pure on our own strength. When Jesus lived on this earth, he
lived a life of perfect purity—with pure motives, pure relationships, pure
thinking, pure actions, and pure speech. Not only has he given us a model of
purity, but he is also the one who gives us the strength to fight against
temptation when it comes our way. In 1 Corinthians 10:13, we are given this
remarkable promise: “God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it.”
Christ is our lifeline, no matter how
ferociously the blizzards swirl around us.
Look
around your house today, searching for anything that may be tempting you and blocking
the way of purity in your life. Is there anything you need to get rid of? Is
there anything you need to put limits around?
—Stephanie Rische
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