Last week a friend of mine went on a buffalo hunt (good job, Dan) in Idaho. He bagged a 2200 pound beast. All that is good stuff. He had been trying for many years to have his name drawn in a lottery type drawing, which he faithfully entered year after year. This was his year, 2008! My friend spent weeks preparing. He tried different calibers of rifles and researched information about his prey. He even prayed about his prey. (That one was for you, Dan) Finally the big hunt came and he, as I’ve stated, was successful.
Now that the excitement of the upcoming hunt had been fulfilled, and he was successful, he was left with the next set of problems to face. Do you have any idea, for example, how large the hide is that covers a 2200 pound Buffalo? How about the trophy head? That baby alone weighs in at more than the average NFL running back. My friend came to my house the other day to see if the hide would fit in a spare upright freezer that I have, because it will be about two weeks before it can be tanned by his taxidermist. It didn’t fit inside my freezer. It wouldn’t have fit inside two of them! Finally he found a solution to that problem and can now look ahead to, well, what to do with the head. After that the hits keep on coming. This creature will produce 800+ pounds of fresh meat, and that does not include the 300-400 pounds of meat that he donated! I don’t know how big your freezer is, but most of them aren’t manufactured with the 2200 pound buffalo in mind. I believe that he now has all the ducks pretty well lined up to handle this windfall of his, but my point is that we are never truly sure what the demands of life are going to be, even when on the surface, or at first glance, we can see that we are receiving some blessing. That blessing may require something from us. It may stretch us or cause us to be set in motion to do things that might otherwise not be required of us.
I wonder what it was like to be one of the Apostles. I think often of Paul and how he saw the Lord as a threat and then was stricken blind on the road to Damascus. This all changed his life completely and he became one of the Lord’s biggest proponents and disciples and eventually, of course, His Apostle. Being an Apostle seems like a position of incredible distinction until you stop and read the many trials, tribulations and sufferings that the Apostles endured. Paul wrote some of his most inspiring epistles whilst in chains and bondage. Recall how the disciples asked Christ about occupying a position of prestige in His kingdom. It is doubtful that any of them would have been able to understand the great responsibilities and demands that those positions would require of them, particularly in regards to the suffering.
Life is unpredictable. Even the things that we receive as blessings cannot be fully understood until they are actually in our hands. Those blessings may demand changes and adjustments that we cannot foresee. Interestingly, as it was with the Apostles, the fullness of the blessings is only completely realized through the fulfillment of the demands, which the blessing actually produces. The Apostles would undoubtedly tell us that it was all worth it. With God, it always is.
Blessings!

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