Mr. Salomon Mbutcho believes that achieving obedience through humility and simplicity does not necessarily require suffering. Those who through certain difficult situations keep smiling, often say that the Lord has a tremendous sense of humor, while others, equally rational, find the Lord’s methods of accomplishing His purposes to be extraordinarily brilliant. God having created us exclusively for his Glory, will do EVERYTHING so that He is glorified through each of our lives. If He opposes to everything that has to happen to us and that He does not agree with, He sometimes lets us go through with our most twisted, most perverse acts, and as if we were blinded (Romans 10: 8), we go straight to failure, humiliation, rejection, betrayal etc. All these things that we have feared throughout our lives then fall on us as if by surprise.
With God there is no such thing, we have actually been warned by subliminal messages, direct messages, signals and all other forms of kicking to which we have remained oblivious. We have lost a lot to these difficulties due to our widespread disobedience. And in the midst of difficulties, humiliated, deposed, betrayed and rejected by all, any obstacle seems insurmountable, we paint everything under the flags of satan while he has nothing to do with it this time (James 1: 13-16) .
Salomon Mbutcho believes that at this point we are indeed and actively the cause of our own downfall. The sense of humor that we give God in relation to our difficulties is just a placebo effect to justify us that it is God who let things happen and that there is nothing we can do about it. This is not the case, because in fact it is we who have done everything and the fact of having constantly disobeyed God and of having been constantly stubborn, has made us a being whose heart hardened and became unresponsive to the spirit of God, therefore, only lessons, hardships to the point of bottoming out, can turn us around in a definite way.
God says to Himself that even if he intervenes by force and makes us change, soon or later we are going to go back and eat what He had made us vomit, therefore He would sometimes prefer that we go all the way and turn around by ourselves. This is the pure proof of our lack of trust in God.
A young man was playing ball and juggling by himself on the edge of a cliff. Passers-by kept telling him « don’t play here, you might slip », and that made him laugh and he always said « don’t worry, I’m not going to fall, I’m too good at it ». Thirty minutes later his ball was racing towards the cliff and he followed it, but when it came to braking he slipped slightly but enough to pass to the other side of the cliff. Believed to be gone forever, his reflexes allowed him to cling to a stub of a tree root that stuck out from the cliff.
Twenty meters below him, the waves were crashing against the bottom of the cliff with violence and a deafening noise, revealing in their retreats the sharp blades of the rocks which formed their basement. In dread, despair and dismay, he cried out « Help, somebody, help », so loudly that a couple in a very powerful and robust motorized military canoe approached the bottom of the cliff and the man stepped forward and called out from below saying « let go of your tie and jump in our canoe, It is full of air, wide and powerful, you cannot miss the goal », the young person hesitated and said « it is not sure « , the gentleman replied: » I assure you that it is sure, jump quickly before another wave comes back”, the youngster replied by telling them:“ No it’s ok thank you, go ahead ”.
As soon as they left the young man started again: « Help, help, someone come and help me, help!!! And this time, as luck would have it, a National Army helicopter on its way to a mission saw from above what was happening and decided to help. He began to approach and to avoid breaking the propellers against the walls of the cliff, he got about five meters from the young man after having thrown a harness to him, one of the soldiers asked him to let go of everything and to jump in order for them to hoist him up and put him out of danger. The young man repeated his scenario of lack of trust and refused to follow the instructions. To even worsen things, he unfastened the harness and asked them to leave.
As soon as they left, a young fisherman who was walking along the edge of the cliff with his friends and who had seen the scenario, run and got a very strong rope, and asked his friends to line up. He then threw the rope down, asked the youngster to just leave the root and grab hold of the rope, and they will hoist him up. And it was again a rebuttal for a third time.
The situation was starting to worsen as this young man, after three hours of hanging in the air clinging to an old dead root, was starting to wear out. His hand was seized with muscle cramping as his eyes reddened as his heart rate was dropping. And despite all this, this young man was hardly trying to say this time that he didn’t even have the strength to let go of the root he was clinging to, let alone take the rope. But before he was finished explaining, the rest of the root came out of the cliff and the young man made a free fall, eventually banging his head against the rocks below and dying.
When he reached heaven, he said to the Lord « why have you forsaken me? Why didn’t you come to my aid? And why haven’t you done something?” It was then that God replied, « But I sent the couple in a motorized canoe, then the helicopter and finally the fishermen, and each time you refused help. What should I do then?” “You didn’t want to trust me. » In fact, in this story, the passers-by who told the youngster to stop playing at the edge of the cliff represent the times the Lord warns us and tells us to change our behavior. The couple in a motorized canoe, the soldiers in the helicopter and the fishermen represent the various attempts made by God to recover us or to bring us in his side. And the old tree root to which the young boy was hanging on to represents those dirty physical and spiritual habits that we hold on to and refuse to give up. These bad practices and habits that are only meant to take us to spiritual and physical death, these bad companies that we can never trust nor count on in the short or long term.
In short, it is the fact of not only disobeying the Lord but also being stubborn in our paths that makes the Lord let us go to the end of our suffering and then call the consequences of this suffering “experience”. And it is often this « experience » that dictates our sudden humility and simplicity in all aspects of our life. Humility and simplicity are lines of character that can be found in someone in a simple or hereditary way but on the one and only condition of having been brought up in the Lord, because at that moment they are part of evidence of the active presence of God in oneself. Otherwise, the other times you will find humility and simplicity in someone is when they have fully understood the lessons and corrections that have been inflicted upon them throughout their life and decided to change. Which will you choose, settle down on your own or cross the desert of hardship with its share of humiliations and hardships?