Splinter

Mike Huckabee tells about his son, John Mark, who was 4-years old. He was playing in the yard when he got a splinter in his foot. He started to cry and ran to Mike crying, “I got a splinter in my foot.” Mike made him sit down on the couch so he could look at it.

When John Mark held up his foot, Mike reached down to pull out the splinter, and John Mark said what every kid says at that point. What do they say? That’s right! “Don’t touch it!” "What do you want me to do? Take a picture of it and mount it on the wall? I've got to touch it, Son. I don't levitate splinters out of your foot. There is no choice." "It will hurt," he moaned. I said, "It might, but it won't hurt as long. It will sure feel a lot better when I get the splinter out."

But somehow that wasn't adequate. So Mike says his wife Janet held down the top of him while he tried to hold down the bottom of him and pull that splinter out. He was kicking and screaming and jerking in all different directions, and here Mike was with the tweezers, trying to pull out the splinter. He said, “I was afraid that I would jab those tweezers way up into his foot.”

Mike said he wanted to say to him, "Son, don't you trust me? What do you think I'm going to do, cut your foot off? I'm not here to hurt you. I'm here to help you, and if you don't let me help you, it's going to get worse not better. Trust me; I'm your father. I love you. I care about you. I do this only to help you. Be still. Relax."

I think sometimes God in heaven must look down upon us. We’re writing in the pain of the sin we’ve committed or the bad attitude we’ve nursed, and we must be like a little child who says, "God, I'm hurt. God help me." God reaches in to help us, and the first thing we do is say, "God, don't touch me! Don't do that God!" God is saying, "But I've got to reach in there and deal with the hurt. It may hurt a little, or even a lot but I've got to do it." We say, "No, God. Please, nothing like that!"

So here we are fighting with God. It is the equivalent of being in surgery when the surgeon has both of his arms up to his elbows in your abdomen, and suddenly you decide that you don't want to be operated on and try to get off the table. How many times in our lives do we find ourselves on the surgery table of the Almighty, where God is trying to work in our lives that miracle of making us like Christ, and when we realize what God's doing, we wake up and say, "God, I don't want you to do this. Let me out of here!"