What kind of dam builder are you?

I think all of us are dam builders to one extent or another.  Let’s imagine our emotions and feelings as a flowing river.  For many, the flow is slow and steady, predictable.  We’re standing in the middle of that flow.  Things come our way, and we let them flow right on by us by giving them to God.  During the best of times, the flow is pleasant…knee deep.  It’s refreshing to let the water wash over us, through us, past us.  Conversely, there are times when the waters rise, the current builds, and it takes all we have to keep from being swept away by the force of it all.  These times are an inevitable part of life.  Bad things happen.  People hurt us.  We lose people we love.  The waters rise, and it’s often beyond our control.  We’re stuck in a thunderstorm of torrential rains, but we know the sun will shine again, and the waters will subside. 

But what about the dams?  Do things come your way that you just can’t let go of...something that is painful, but you insist on holding onto it?  I think of it as building a dam.  For each of those things that I insist on keeping bottled up, I am placing a stick across the water.  The first stick doesn’t do much.  The water continues to flow as usual, but I wedge that stick in place.  Another stick here and there won’t hurt, either.  The water flows through it, around it.  The problem comes when we’ve built ourselves a fortress of a dam, and the water has nowhere to go.  It starts to rise.  Another stick, a little deeper water….until we find ourselves nearly drowning in a pool that we’ve created.  We pray for God to take these burdens from us, but we refuse to let go of them.  We add them to our collection, a collection that will eventually be our demise if we don’t figure out how to get rid of it.  I pray that I might be less of a dam builder and that I may learn to let go of the things that hurt me.