Sabbath Devotional :: The Parable of the Goatheads

Image courtesy Media Library, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

A few weeks ago was bike week at my kids’ school. Since it’s about a half hour bike ride from our house, I didn’t quite trust my boys to make it there on their own. So I loaded my little girl into the bike trailer, and away we all went.

About one block from the school, I was forced off the street onto the sidewalk. I heard a smattering of little crunching sounds, and saw the culprits scattered across the sidewalk: goatheads. (For the unfamiliar – count your blessings – they are nasty little things, the seeds of a pervasive weed with three sharp thorns that hurt like the dickens and are sharp enough to puncture bike tires and shoe soles.)

After getting my boys into school, I examined the tires, and gingerly pried one of the thorns from a trailer tire. Air hissed out of the hole – it had gone all the way through to the tube. I did have a bike pump, but no way to repair the holes, so I filled the tires back up, left the rest of the goatheads in the tires, hoped for the best, and started the ride home.

As each of the tires lost more and more air, it got harder and harder to ride. Even stopping to put more air in the tires only helped for a short time. I was so grateful I had thought to throw the pump into the back of the trailer, but really wished I had something to stop up those holes. We eventually made it home, walking the last two blocks (bless my little girl who “helped” push the trailer), my legs shaking and utterly exhausted.

I later got some of that slime stuff you can put in bike tires to seal holes (pretty sure it’s magic), and now the tires hold air again! Though I’m not sure I’ll brave the ride to school again any time soon.

When the thorns in our lives – personal trials and stresses, the chaos of current politics, natural or personal disasters, the constant barrage of crises around the world, literal thorns! – start poking holes in our lives and deflating us, we can’t just keep trying to pump air back in, or let all the air seep out. It quickly wears us down and eventually becomes impossible to continue our journey. We have to find something to fill the holes, to stop us from deflating: hope, light, support, gratitude, positive action, and especially our Savior.

Even Christ himself faced thorns – a crown of thorns placed on his head in mockery. He too felt the literal and figurative pain of the thorns we face, and by so doing is so lovingly capable of helping us face our own thorns, and filling the holes they leave in our lives.

When Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden of Eden for eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, they were told:

“cursed shall be the ground for thy sake . . . Thorns also, and thistles shall it bring forth to thee.” (Moses 4:23-24)

Thorns, literal and figurative, were the price for knowledge and progression.

Thorns may cause pain, they can even deflate us, but they are “for [our] sake” to give us an opportunity to learn and progress if we remove the thorns and then fill the holes with those things that allow us to grow and press forward on our journey.