Priscilla Hammond ~ What’s Stronger: Wood or Steel?
What’s stronger: wood or steel? You don’t even have to think about it, do you? Steel is a stronger construction material than wood. Steel is harder than wood, so of course, it’s the stronger of the two.
But wait…
My husband and I were hiking at Tallulah Gorge, and I stopped to take this photo. A steel cable that once held up a bridge was wrapped around a tree. The cable was rusted and cut off, and the trunk was all that was left of the tree.
You might think that the steel had cut the tree, but what actually had happened was the tree had grown around the steel cable.
The cable was dead, but the tree was alive. So, the stronger thing was the thing that kept growing. The live tree had overtaken the immovable steel.
Though we are commanded to remember God’s goodness to us in the past, God also calls us to keep moving forward. The angels of the Lord told Lot, “Do not look back or stop anywhere,” but Lot’s wife stopped to look back at what used to be, and she became immovable. When the Hebrews saw Egyptians coming after them, God told Moses, “Tell the people of Israel to go forward,” and God opened the sea so that they could move through.
In the same way, God calls us to keep moving. With God, we are stronger than anything in the world that tries to bind us. The person who is moving forward with God is stronger than the thing that is trying to hold her back.