Untangling Life's Knots

Untangling Life's Knots
by Max Lucado

It's
your best friend's wedding. "I'll take care of the reception," you'd
volunteered. You planned the best party possible. You hired the band,
rented the hall, catered the meal, decorated the room, and asked your
Aunt Bertha to bake the cake.

Now the band is playing and the guests are milling, but Aunt Bertha
is nowhere to be seen. Everything is here but the cake. You sneak over
to the pay phone and dial her number. She's been taking a nap. She
thought the wedding was next week.

Oh boy! Now what do you do? Talk about a problem! Everything is here but the cake ...

Sound familiar?

It might. It's exactly the dilemma Jesus' mother, Mary, was facing.
Back then, wine was to a wedding what cake is to a wedding today.

What Mary faced was a social problem. No need to call 911, but no way to sweep the embarrassment under the rug, either.

When you think about it, most of the problems we face are of the
same caliber. We're late for a meeting. We leave something at the
office. A coworker forgets a report. Mail gets lost. Traffic gets
snarled. The waves rocking our lives are not life threatening yet. But
they can be. A poor response to a simple problem can light a fuse.

For
that reason you might want to note how Mary reacted. Her solution poses
a practical plan for untangling life's knots. "They have no more wine,"
she told Jesus (John 2:3). That's it. That's all she said. She didn't
go ballistic. She simply assessed the problem and gave it to Christ.

It's so easy to focus on everything but the solution. Mary didn't do
that. She simply looked at the knot, assessed it, and took it to the
right person. "I've got one here I can't untie, Jesus."

"When all the wine was gone Jesus' mother said to him, 'They have no more wine'" (John 2:3).

Please note, she took the problem to Jesus before she took it to
anyone else. A friend told me about a tense deacons' meeting he
attended. Apparently there was more agitation than agreement, and after
a lengthy discussion, someone suggested, "Why don't we pray about it?"
to which another questioned, "Has it come to that?"

What causes us to think of prayer as the last option rather than the first?

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