Unbreakable!

 

“Dad,” Elise said.  “I cannot break my dress!”

I looked at her.  I wasn’t sure that Elise's dress really looked like it was indestructible.  It looked nothing like the flame-retardant suits that some folks wear around the racetrack.

“It is made of cotton!”  She said proudly.  “Cotton is not like glass.  It doesn’t break.”

At least I could see where she was going.  “Yes,” I said agreeably.  “Cotton doesn’t break like glass does.  It’s surprising they don’t make dinner plates out of cotton.”

Elise nodded her head wisely.  If she was tsar of the manufacturing, a lot more things would be made of cotton.

A few days later, the two of us were together.  Elise had her boots with her, but she wasn’t wearing them.  Instead, she was standing on top of them, bouncing up and down.

“I think you should probably stop bouncing on those boots,” I told her.  “You might make it hard to wear them in the future.”

“Don’t worry Dad,” Elise told me with confidence.  “These boots are made of cotton!”

This was a punchline I wasn’t expecting.  Of course, the boots weren’t made of cotton.  I’m guess they were made of some leather-like material.  More than that, cotton is not nearly as unbreakable as my four-year old daughter believes.

The Apostle Paul wrote to the Corinthian Christians, “We are pressed on every side by troubles, but we are not crushed. We are perplexed, but not driven to despair.  We are hunted down, but never abandoned by God. We get knocked down, but we are not destroyed.  Through suffering, our bodies continue to share in the death of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be seen in our bodies.” (II Corinthians 4:8-10 NLT)

Paul went through suffering that would destroy most of us.  He was probably made of sterner stuff than the average human, but even he would have broken had it not been for the fact that he was “never abandoned by God.”

None of us can stand for long by ourselves.  Each one of us has a breaking point and yet, as we lean on divine power, we can survive terrible suffering.  It is not that we are enough, but that our God is enough.  He it is that can make us strong – even stronger, in fact, than indestructible cotton.