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FROM THE BACKWOODS PEW
Can’t Fall Out of a Mud Hole On one of my first days in forestry, I found a forester’s rendition of “Murphy’s Law.” That is the law that states, among many addi- Antill tions and variations, “If anything can go wrong, it will go wrong.” The one that I put on my wall nearly 30 years ago includes this piece of wisdom: “You can’t fall out of a mud hole.” I have spent my career trying to prove that law as unconstitutional, but to no avail. I submit the following: You can jump into a mud hole. One day, while trying to cross a flowing stream and standing on a solid sand bar, I decided I could jump to another sand bar in midstream with little difficulty. This particular sandbar, however, was obviously floating as I went straight up to my knees in mud. You can drive into a mud hole. In this case, like a tiger trap, the hole had a layer of ice across it. In fact, the ice was level and even with the road, giving the appearance of being part of the road. My truck crashed through the ice and into the mud hole beneath. I eventually was extracted, but then I had to drive
back through that same hole in order to leave the property, and that is another story. You can walk into a mud hole. While crossing a deep swamp on foot, what looked at first to be dry, hard mud, turned out to be only a baked crust. When I stepped on it, the mud hole swallowed my boot, my leg, and was working on the rest of me by the time I crawled out. You can meet a snake in a mud hole. While stuck up to my knees and looking for some high ground on which to crawl, I found it to be occupied by a rather large cottonmouth moccasin snake. He too was muddy, so I let him keep the high ground. It was the Christian thing to do. You can lose a boot in a mud hole. Ask the young lad with me who was looking for arrowheads one day after a heavy rain had turned a clay hillside into mud. When I heard him cry out, he was walking in his socks, his boots sticking in the mud behind him. You can lose a hip wader in a mud hole. This is really just a taller boot that requires a deeper mud hole. I had to pull it out separately after I got my leg out of it. Like the young lad, I was walking in my socks. You can spend hours in a mud
hole. Time flies while you are waiting for someone to pull you out. Can you say “Solitaire,” boys and girls? You can be talked into trying to drive through a mud hole. Don’t listen. It will result in more solitaire. “And now my soul is poured out because of my plight; the days of affliction take hold of me. My bones are pierced in me at night, and my gnawing pains take no rest. By great force my garment is disfigured; it binds me about as the collar of my coat. He has cast me into the mire [MUD HOLE], and I have become like dust and ashes.”—Job 30:16-19 Job, in calling out to God, declares that God has thrown him into a mud hole, into the mire. He is in agony. All that he had, all the blessings, now seem to be lying in the mud hole with him; they have become worthless. In his despair, he calls out yet again: “I cry out to You, but You do not answer me; I stand up, and You regard me. But You have become cruel to me; with the strength of Your hand You oppose me. You lift me up to the wind and cause me to ride on it; You spoil my success. For I know that You will bring me to death, and to the house appointed for all living.”—Job 30:20-23 It would be easy for you and I to look at Job and his trouble, and per-
haps see our own despair, to see the agony we might be in. We too might wonder if our prayers are simply bouncing off of the ceiling, returning to us null and void. Like Job, stuck in the mud hole of life, crying for help, yet he is getting no response. And to that, we would be right, for we share a lot with Job. His predicament is ours; his complaint is ours. We are stuck in the mud hole of life—dirty, covered with shame. We cry out to be clean, to again have a relationship with God. Our cries echo that of another who shared that same predicament. There is one who gave up all he had; one that took on suffering; one that called out to heaven, wondering where the help was: “And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, ‘My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?’”—Matthew 27:46 We can’t fall out of the mud hole. We are stuck. The results of sin cover us. The pain of living in a fallen world—of dealing with cancer and divorce, or of fighting greed and corruption—pulls us down and holds us. With no hope, no way out, and no way to get clean on our own, our Father, who loved us, sent his Son Jesus into the mud hole. In the mud hole he shared our pain, our confusion, and our cries for deliverance. And on the cross, he answered Job. On the cross, he secured for Job, his soul. The rest of life is but dirt and ashes when compared to the soul. The mud hole doesn’t matter if the soul has been rescued. Just like the sole of your foot might be stuck in a mud hole, your soul is too. Only Jesus can rescue it. Thank God that he loved us so, that Jesus came into the mud hole, so our soul could fall out of the mud hole, clean and secure. “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Do not cast me away from Your presence, and do not take Your Holy Spirit from me.”— Psalms 51:10,11 Excerpt from “Sideroads, Snares, and Souls” Brad Antill author. Find it at www.onatreeforestry.com Brad Antill has been a forester in the woods and swamps of the Southeast Coastal Plain for over 30 years. Besides being a forester, he is also an ordained minister of the Gospel, and together they combine as his two passions. He and his wife Cindy created On-A-Tree Forestry as a way of sharing his unique views of the gospel story. They share the fingerprints of God that are revealed every day in those same woods and swamps. Brad is a graduate of The Ohio State University forestry program, and a registered forester in North Carolina and West Virginia.
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MAY 2021 l Southern Loggin’ Times
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