You can do what you really want

Like most of the Boys in junior school, I was full of energy and the whole world was before me. But during the early morning class break one day, I was running around the playground when my legs collapsed underneath me. I couldn’t get up.

For a while, I was left in this predicament as my classmates figured it was one of my amateur performances. The sound of weeping must have convinced them differently for they sought out the school nurse who quickly saw to it that my parents were informed.

At this late date, the medical diagnosis is long forgotten, but I remember being told I would not be able to attend school for a few weeks. My mother had to push me in a wheelchair to doctor’s appointments and other activities with the incentive of a bribe that if I was a good boy, she would buy me a treat.

The weeks passed and the summer holidays approached. While visiting the doctor, my mother told him I wanted to go to my aunt’s farm in a nearby village. I’d done it several times and it had become the highlight of my year. The doctor responded, “If he can walk to the other side of the room he can go.”

When we came in that office, I thought there was no way I could walk even that far. Yet with that incentive, pain or no pain, I walked across that room and, thanks be to God, the problem never returned.

We have all probably seen similar things in our own lives. You can do what you really want to do regardless of fatigue, pain and sacrifice. The bout of flu may not be over, but we manage to make some pleasant function that we really wanted to attend. If the task at work must be done to meet a critical deadline, sickness can be overcome or weariness ignored.

We can burn the midnight oil finishing a task so we can leave on vacation or we can stay awake until 2 a.m. at some enjoyable activity. You can do what you really want to do.

Now there is surely a lesson is this which I learned in the fleeting moments of youth: First things first. In a way, the Son of God echoed this sentiment when he said, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things will be added unto you.”

Let us be like the young boy who refused to let anything stop him from reaching the other side of the room. Let us have the spirit of David who said: “One thing have I desired of the Lord, that I will seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in his temple” (Psa. 27:4).