A man sat in his balcony enjoying the sunshine and his coffee when a little ant caught his eye. It was carrying a big leaf several times more than its size. He saw that the ant faced many obstacles during its journey.
At one point the tiny creature came across a crack in the floor. It paused for a little while, analyzed…and then laid the huge leaf over the crack, walked over the leaf, picked the leaf on the other side then continued it’s journey.
The man was captivated by the cleverness of the ant. In front of his eyes there was this tiny creature of God, lacking in size yet equipped with a brain to analyze, contemplate, reason, explore, discover and overcome.
But along with all these capabilities, the man also noticed that this tiny creature shared some human shortcomings. An hour later the creature had reached its destination – a tiny hole in the floor which was the entrance to its underground dwelling. It was at this point that the ant’s shortcoming was revealed. How could the ant carry into the tiny hole the large leaf that it had managed to carefully bring to the destination? It simply couldn’t! So the tiny creature, after all the painstaking and hard work and great skills exercised, overcoming all the difficulties along the way, just left behind the large leaf and went home empty-handed.
The ant had not thought about the end before it began its journey and in the end the large leaf was nothing more than a burden to it. The creature had no option, but to leave it behind to reach its destination. The man learned a great lesson that day.
Isn’t that the truth about our lives? We worry about our family, our job, how to earn more money, where we should live, what kind of car to buy, dresses to wear, all sorts of things, only to abandon all these things when we reach our destination – the Grave.
In our life’s journey, we don’t realize that these are simply burdens that we carry with so much care and difficulty, only to find that in the end they are useless and we can’t take them along with us.
Just like in Jesus’ Parable of the Rich Fool, the man said to himself, “Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, [and] be merry.”
But God said unto him, “[Thou] fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided?” So [is] he that lays up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God. (Luke 12:19-21)