Peanuts
My grandfather was a peanut farmer in Oklahoma. So when I was growing up it was not unusual for us to have a large burlap sack full of peanuts hanging around the house somewhere.
Peanuts grow off the bottom of a peanut plant, and they actually grow down into the ground. Because of this, peanuts grow inside of a protective shell. If there was no shell, there would be no peanut. But the good stuff of a peanut is not the shell, it's the stuff on the inside. The point of the shell is to protect the good stuff inside.
So those sacks full of harvested and dried peanuts that we used to have around the house when I was a kid weren’t really full of peanuts like you might buy in a jar at the store. They were full of whole peanuts, shells and all. And every kid in Oklahoma learned from a young age that you didn’t just pick up an unshelled peanut and eat it because that was not a pleasant experience. Shells are hard and tough and taste like dirt. Before you can enjoy a peanut, first you have to get it out of its shell.
I take you on that bizarre little trip down memory lane for a reason that has nothing to do with peanuts, but might have everything to do with you.
Sometimes people live lives that are pretty much great. They are well-loved and well-cared about, and they love well and care well about the people in their lives. And those people often times have very thin shells, because they don’t need them. And as a result, they are pretty great to be around because they live their lives with open hearts.
But that is not everybody. In fact, that's hardly anybody.
Most people, to some degree or other, grow up in the dirt. Most people have been let down and pushed down and beat down in ways that are hurtful and leave some lasting scars. And down there, in the dirt of life, if a person is going to make it they are going to need a pretty tough shell.
And so, we grow them. For the same reason that peanuts have shells. To protect the good stuff on the inside from all the dirt.
And it kind of works, I think. Sort of. But it also kind of doesn’t.
One problem is that our shells don’t protect us from the dirt nearly so well as we think they do. Even with the thickest of shells we still get pretty roughed up. Another problem is that we’re really good at growing shells, but really bad at breaking out of them. We get stuck inside of them and they do us far more harm than good.
For the people around us, our shells are really unpleasant, because like all shells, they taste like dirt. And for us, our shells become our prisons. We built them to protect ourselves, but we forgot to build a door, so now life is happening all around us, but we can’t get out there to happen with it.
What we need is a better protector. Maybe even a healer. Something that can do for us the thing that these shells failed to do, and something that can break us out of these shells now that we’ve got them.
It just so happens that I know where we can find that.
In Psalm 18 in the Bible we read:
“The Lord is my rock, my fortress and my deliverer;
my God is my rock, in whom I take refuge,
my shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.”
As it turns out, everything we need, God is. Let's get out of these crusty worthless shells of ours, and get into Him. The door is open. Let's walk through it.