Over by our church up in Northern Illinois, there's a nature preserve with a little museum and a series of outdoor cages.
Sitting in my car, waxing philosophical, I almost could see some church members around me.
A fox in a cage.
The thought is pretty gruesome without my commenting.
These are little creatures of the night, and day too, who love the freedom of hunting and romping around with their fellows.
A fox in a cage.
What is he thinking? What does life mean for him any more? He eats and sleeps and paces and gawks at visitors gawking at him.
But that's it.
Does your church have any caged foxes? These are the folks who have allowed tradition and a set of doctrines and an established lifestyle tell them, there just aint no more.
(Pardon my English.
) This is life.
I go to church on Sundays, I hang out for an hour or so, I go home and live my life within these tiny boundaries that man and even minister have made for me.
How God wants to set His people free.
In one of the cages was a one-eyed hawk.
One eye? Why the very existence of a hawk in the wild is based on his sight.
That's why this one had to be caged.
No sight, no flight.
No meals.
Soon he becomes a victim himself.
Like some of us.
The very thing we need the most to make it in our spiritual walk - vision - is being taken from us by the Thief himself.
Take a man's vision and he begins to think that all that is left is tele-vision.
He'll live his life from the couch and in other people's experiences.
No vision means Heaven and hell aren't that real.
Jesus is not that powerful.
Miracles are for yesterday or someone else.
Love is a feeling.
Faith is imagination.
No vision, people perish.
I was not exempt from the pictures I was seeing on that day.
Sitting in my car, viewing these sad animals, I remembered that parked cars also tell a story.
Imagine you're driving along on the freeway, and you just suddenly want to pull over and stop.
Period.
That's the end of your journey.
Everyone passes you by.
You don't get where you're going.
Eventually you're hauled away by the police.
Sounds absurd, but no more so than those who have been running the race, and then, because of Western comforts or the cares of this life, they just pull over.
They quit.
Life and other believers pass them by, and eventually the great officer Death takes them away, unfulfilled, to face the Maker of all.
Churches quit, too.
They lock into a doctrinal and experiential stance and say, this is us.
This is how far we are going.
Pass us if you will, but if you do, you're probably demonic.
We are the ones...
That denominational spirit litters our spiritual freeways with masses of parked cars.
Time to move on.
Out of the cage, back into the air, into high gear.
There is a race to be run, a fight to be won.
Don't get left behind.