I thank the Lord for life experiences. Like some of you, some of mine weren’t pretty, but life experiences they remain. However, they are not life experiences if we do not learn from them, far too often they remain stumbling stones.

Yesterday during our prayer meeting to commit the week to the Lord, I got a stark image of a torrential river flowing. As it flowed there were people on either side chopping trees and letting them fall into the river endeavouring to stop the flow. How many of us have become accomplished “woodcutters”? I suspect some of us are woodcutters yet do not even realise that we are. Are we halting the flow of the river of God through our ignorance, our inability to see, our inability to understand what God is doing in our church, our lives, and the world? Sadly, many of us are, but all “in the name of truth”.

You see, the torrential river will continue to flow around the obstacles and stumbling stones you and I throw in its way. I guess those of us with eyes to see, and who are waist deep in the river, allow it to carry us with its flow and obediently listen to the voice of God as he ploughs through and around the obstacles.

What am I saying? Well, have you become a woodcutter? Do you hinder the flow of the river of God because the way it is flowing does not fit your agenda? Has your life as a leader begun to shrivel like a desert bush and the folk who are following have begun to do likewise? As leaders we reproduce after our own kind.

Jeremiah 17:5-8 is an amazing passage for me particularly where the Lord says; “He will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit”.

Are you that tree? Or have you fallen over and become an obstruction to the flow of the river of God?