Little Problems, Big Problems

Part of my reason for blogging about that poem yesterday was that someone shared something similar to that on Facebook, just not in poem form. I knew there was a poetic version of the message, so I looked it up and decided to share it here. Another part of the reason I shared the poem is that its message is similar to one I heard in a story from the BYU devotional of this Tuesday. As I remember it (the text for the devotional isn't available yet), a man was trekking across the country (I'm suddenly no longer sure which one) on foot. He had scaled mountains and crossed deserts, presumably encountered wild animals, and probably had a near-death experience or two. When asked what the most difficult part of his journey so far had been, he thought for a moment, then answered that it was probably that, while crossing the desert, the sand kept getting in his shoes.

When compared to mountain climbing, getting sand in your shoes doesn't seem like a terrible problem. It's not life-threatening. It may be annoying, but it couldn't stop you from completing your journey. Or could it? The longer sand stays in your shoes, the more of an irritant it becomes. What was, at first, just mildly annoying, can become seriously painful and can cause actual damage to your feet. And when you're on a trek of a thousand miles, you don't want your feet to take any damage.

Over the course of our spiritual journeys, we will face many serious challenges, and even more smaller ones. I'm not worried about the big challenges. When it comes to scaling mountains, we've got a pretty good history of putting our shoulders to the wheel and overcoming. But how good are we at handling life's little problems? When someone says something rude to us, how quickly do we forgive them? When we're tempted to say something rude back, how long do we let that temptation stay in our minds? One of the reasons the sand-in-your-shoes problem seems so slight is because it's easy to fix. You just stop every once in a while and dump the sand out of your shoes. It's not too terribly hard to forgive a rude person and move on without being rude in return, but how quickly and how frequently do we do that?

Because small sins and vices seem inconsequential, it's easy to ignore them, and when we do, they fester in us and start to cause big problems for us. We shouldn't ignore hurt feelings or un-Christlike thoughts, we should resolve them. The sooner we do that, the less damage they'll do to us. When hiking across a desert or sailing across an ocean, you're going to get some water in your boat or some sand in your shoes. It's inevitable. When that happens, it's important that we dump it out before those "little problems" stop us from reaching our goal.