A Little Less Help, Please

Have you ever found numbers of cicada shells hanging on trunks of trees in August? You know, one of those transparent, buglike things that looks like a dead insect until you pick it up and discover that it's really an empty shell from which the cicada has gone? Once in a while you'll find the cicada still in one of them.

Well, Josie did one day, and it really shook her up watching the thing trying to work its way out of that shell. In fact, Josie felt so sorry for the little creature that she ran into the house and got her mother's manicure scissors. She snipped away part of the shell and carefully helped the cicada out. She placed it in a jar for protection and watched it begin its new life outside that awful shell.

She didn't watch for very long, though, for in a few hours the cicada died. Josie had killed it with kindness! God had designed the cicada and the shell for a purpose. And part of the cicada's preparation for life was to struggle to free itself from its shell. That lonely struggle gives the little creature the strength to live on the outside. Deprived of that necessary exercise, the cicada lacks the strength to live.

Sometimes we think that life is pretty rough on us. Mom and Dad refuse to buy us everything we think we want and make us go out and earn it the hard way. They know that half the fun of getting something is in earning it yourself. When things come hard we appreciate them more. If we never had to reach farther than our wrist our muscles would not grow. We have to buck up against life in order to be able to face new things as they come along.

Help me, O God, to learn to help myself.