From a Cluttered Desk

I am Tammy Cardwell, she of the cluttered desk. (Hey, you think I'm kidding?!) I'm having a blast here in Blogland and invite to you to peruse my ramblings. Like a buffet, they offer variety - essentially whatever makes it to the top of the piles that sometimes clutter my brain. We'll eventually cover it all - homeschooling, God, our church, the Eclectic Homeschool Online, books I'm writing and publishing, conferences I speak at, the joys of grandmotherhood, and hopefully chocolate. Of course, this is only what's near the top now. Who knows what's in those piles?

God can use the most unusual things to preach sermons to us!

Anyone who has done much reading here knows we homeschooled our sons. Homeschooling can lead to some interesting experiments, and one of ours involved silkworms.

The silkworm’s life cycle is fairly well known. The worm eats constantly until the day it spins a cocoon around itself, then it settles in and starts changing. Eventually it exits the cocoon as a lovely little silk moth and flies away. That’s the way it’s supposed to happen at any rate.

With two of our silkworms, we got the common result. Not so with the third; it never left the cocoon. You can tell it started trying, but for whatever reason it never left its protective shell. I still have that cocoon, with its dead contents. I also kept one of the empty cocoons. God has used them more than once to teach me and remind me of certain truths. I call them my sermons in a box – Silkworm Sermons.

Get Out of Your Comfort Zone and Fly
God’s first silkworm sermon (preached privately to me) was about the dangers of the comfort zone. How many times in our lives do we fall into the comfort zone trap, refusing to move forward into new territory because we feel comfortable, even safe, where we are?

It’s an age-old failing. The children of Israel did the very same thing. For all that they complained almost constantly, they were relatively comfortable with the dessert, disinclined to leave their safe place and enter apparently dangerous new territory. I can remember times in my life when I’ve felt pretty much the same way!

I once heard a man say that if you want to have something you’ve never had you’ve got to do something you’ve never done. Israel was offered that chance; they refused – and that generation died. Just like that silkworm, they failed to leave their nice, safe place – their comfort zone – and they died in the dessert.

I refuse. I like my comfort zones as much as anyone, but if I’m facing two choices – one that will leave me dead in the dessert, trapped in silk – and another that will leave me free to fly as the next generation (and the other two silkworms) eventually did – I’m kicking the cocoon!

That’s just a decision of course. When you get to the follow through the going can get a little rough – or a lot rough. The dead silkworm did try to leave the cocoon, after all. Why did it fail? A battle begun may be half won, but it’s only half won. Sadly, again, it’s usually self that causes us the most trouble.

I’m thinking about Israel again, of course. They’d begun taking new ground, but came to a critical point when one man gave into his own selfish desires and took from Jericho something God had already said belonged to Him alone. Had Israel not dealt with this sin when they did, a whole nation could have died right then and there. Even when self is forced out of its comfort zone, it must still be kept under constant guard or it will stop you in your tracks.

But it can be conquered, and both the nation of Israel and the silk moths that flew away are proof that we have within us the power to enter into amazing new life if we will only determine to leave that comfortable, familiar, old life behind.

Celebrating Jesus!
Tammy C