Nine-year-old Tim was visiting his cousins and having a fun-filled week in the Adirondack Mountains. Every day the cousins went hiking or canoeing together. One time they hiked to a waterfall with a cave behind it.
One of the days was hot, and Tim and his cousins were swimming in the lake. It was not a very big lake and most of the shoreline was rocky, but it was a large enough lake to have a swimming area with a beach. At the far end of the sandy beach, a small stream emptied into the lake.
After lunch Tim didn’t feel like swimming anymore, so he went to see where some of the other children were making little boats out of leaves and sticks and floating them down the stream and out into the lake. It was fun pretending to launch entire fleets of ships into what they now called “the ocean.” But they were having a problem. The shoreline of the stream, which had now become “the river” heading to the ocean, was twisty, and all the boats heading down the river to the ocean were crashing into the rocky shoreline and ending up shipwrecked! So Tim decided to widen and deepen the riverbed. As he began his project, some of the cousins wanted to know what he planned to do, and then they wanted to help.
As time slipped by, the project grew larger and more challenging. Deepening the riverbed led to building a dam to increase the water level. Then the dam overflowed, so a channel was built for runoff. More cousins came to help. The dam broke again. Tim proved to be a good leader and got the cousins to work together. It was a busy, noisy afternoon.
At supper time, all the hungry cousins were called to come for a hotdog roast. It was then that they stopped to inspect what their afternoon’s work had accomplished. The stream that had begun that day as a quiet channel about a foot wide and six-inches deep was now three feet wide and a foot deep. It had taken fifteen children four hours to change the stream’s direction, and now the old drainage bed was dry. And all this came about because a young boy named Tim wanted to sail his ships in safe waters.
Those of you boys and girls who have accepted the Lord Jesus as your Saviour, have you ever thought about what an influence you can be on your school friends or the children in your neighborhood? Have you ever told them that you belong to Jesus and what that means? Even one little person can make a big difference to one other person. Tim changed the direction of a “river” by getting his cousins to work with him, and your telling a friend about Jesus could change the direction of his or her life and maybe some other lives too.
Some of your school friends may never have heard the story of Jesus and His love. They may never have been told that when they purposely do something wrong it is called sin. And some may not know that the Bible says that even one sin will keep them out of heaven. They need to hear that Jesus loves them and died on Calvary’s cross for them and that He can wash away all their sins. Maybe you are the one who can tell them and explain that if they make the decision to let Jesus wash them clean of their sins, they can go to heaven.
You don’t have to be a big person or a preacher to tell others about Jesus. Do you remember how Jesus used a little boy’s lunch to feed five thousand people? Jesus would like to use you to tell others about His love and that He died for them. That little boy’s lunch was a blessing to five thousand people, and telling others about Jesus could turn out to be a blessing to many others too.
Will you tell a friend today about Jesus? It could change the direction of your friend’s life.
ML-09/22/2002