An experiment was performed with tropical fish in a very large tank. Before the fish were placed inside, a glass divider was put roughly in the middle, leaving only half of the tank accessible to the fishes. The fish were then dropped in and swam from one end of the tank to the divider and back.
They left them like this for an unspecified, or more likely, unremembered by me, length of time...
Eventually, the people doing the experiment did remove the glass divider and then watched and waited. What they reported in their results was both unexpected and disturbingly understandable...
The fish would swim as they always had, back and forth from one end of the tank to the spot the glass divider USED to be...
They stopped just short of the glass planes placement and turned around, trapped by the memory of the glasses once present limits...
I've never done this experiment on fish before and can't claim for certain it's validity on them, but I have seen the same affect on other species.
Mostly human ones...
Like most of you, I have a mirror and a memory. I don't look in the mirror nearly as often as I did when I weighed 170 lbs and had a full head of hair, but I still do look sometimes.
My memory is shot. Clouded and kailaidescopic in its recollections, many pieced together from stories and flashbacks of times long before the booze and uncountable thumps to my head had taken place..
I still remember that divider. You can tell, because if you watch me " swim", I still stop millimeters before the removed glass section and deftly turn around, swimming back toward the " tanks" wall...
The sad thing is that fish swim in schools.
Rarely will one swim away, alone. So the odds are pretty good that a lot of fish are swimming this way, along side, not even knowing.
I think the section of tank we inhabited is the world. That would make the divider the wall of sin that separates us from God. The one who removed the glass section is Jesus...
And the rest of the tank, now freely open?
Maybe that would be Gods Grace and Love...
Of course once Jesus removed the glass, the entire tank would become Gods Grace and Love...
But by swimming in only a small section, we limit the abundance He freely gives...
I'm probably the only one who finds himself in the small section of the tank, most of the time..
The fact is, if I TRULY trusted Gods words, not only would I be swimming the length of the tank, but when I hit the end I would jump out like a flying fish, into the outside I couldn't see.
Somedays I do venture past where the glass divider used to be. There are moments that my spirit has leapt out of the tank into deeper and cleaner and better water that The Lord always provided, when I leapt.
The problem is, that my memory is short, and that does quite a number on Faith...
I think that may be why I write things down, sometimes. To remember and remind myself that every time I leapt I was either caught or landed well enough to stand back up and jump again.
Faith and memory are so closely tied together.
All we need to do is to remember Gods track record, as my Pastor always says...
Faith can never wither, if we keep doing that.
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