A friend of mine shared this parable with me years ago. I came across it the other day and it encouraged me. I hope it encourages you right were you are at in your current circumstances or where you are along your journey. You may not have thought about it, but life is a journey.
There was a man who had four sons. He wanted his sons to learn not to judge things too quickly. So he sent them each on a quest, in turn, to go and look at a pear tree that was a great distance away.
The first son went in the winter, the second in the spring, the third in summer, and the youngest son in the fall.
When they had all gone and come back, he called them together to describe what they had seen.
The first son said that the tree was ugly, bent, and twisted.
The second son said no it was covered with green buds and full of promise.
The third son disagreed; he said it was laden with blossoms that smelled so sweet and looked so beautiful, it was the most graceful thing he had ever seen.
The last son disagreed with all of them; he said it was ripe and drooping with fruit, full of life and fulfillment.
The man then explained to his sons that they were all right, because they had each seen but only one season in the tree’s life.
He told them that you cannot judge a tree, or a person, by only one season, and that the essence of who they are and the pleasure, joy, and love that come from that life can only be measured at the end, when all the seasons are up.
If you give up when it’s winter, you will miss the promise of your spring, the beauty of your summer, fulfillment of your Autumn.
Don’t let the pain of one season destroy the joy of all the rest. Don’t judge life by one difficult season. Persevere through the difficult patches and better times are sure to come sometime.
We all go through difficult seasons along our journey of life, but our circumstances don’t have to define who we really are.
I hope you can grasp this….
You are not your past
You are not your failures
You are not your parents
You are not your siblings
You are not your friends
You are not your regrets
You are not your weight
You are not your divorce
You are not your unemployment
You are not the choices someone else made for you
You are not your brokenness
You are not your bitterness
You are not your abuse
You are not your loneliness
You are not your marital status
You are not your crisis
You are not [fill in the blank]
*Adapted from ‘You Are Not’
I could keep going, but I think you get the point.
Failures keep you humble, success keeps you hopeful, but your dreams keep you going. You only have to open your eyes!
When you choose to stop living out ‘who you are not’ and you start to live in ‘who you are’, it changes everything!
