One Sunday morning, a wealthy man sat in his balcony enjoying sunshine and
his coffee when a little ant caught his eye which was going from one side to
the other side of the balcony carrying a big leaf several times more than its
size. The man watched it for more than an hour. He saw that the ant faced many
impediments during its journey, paused, took a diversion and then continued
towards destination.
At one point the tiny creature came across a crack in the floor. It paused
for a little while, analyzed and then laid the huge leaf over the crack, walked
over the leaf, picked the leaf on the other side then continued its journey.
The man was captivated by the cleverness of the ant, one of God’s tiniest creatures.
The incident left the man in awe and forced him to contemplate over the miracle
of Creation. It showed the greatness of the Creator. In front of his eyes there
was this tiny creature of God, lacking in size yet equipped with a brain to
analyze, contemplate, reason, explore, discover and overcome. Along with all
these capabilities, the man also noticed that this tiny creature shared some
human shortcomings.
The man saw about an hour later the creature had reached its destination – a
tiny hole in the floor which was entrance to its underground dwelling. And it
was at this point that the ant’s shortcoming that it shared with the man was
revealed. How could the ant carry into the tiny hole the large leaf that it had
managed to carefully bring to the destination? It simply couldn’t!
So the tiny creature, after all the painstaking and hard work and exercising
great skills, overcoming all the difficulties along the way, just left behind
the large leaf and went home empty-handed.
The ant had not thought about the end before it began its challenging
journey and in the end the large leaf was nothing more than a burden to it. The
creature had no option, but to leave it behind to reach its destination. The
man learned a great lesson that day.
Isn’t that the truth about our lives?
We worry about our family, we worry about our job, we worry about how to
earn more money, we worry about where we should live – 5 bedroom or 6 bedroom
house, what kind of vehicle to buy – a Mercedes or BMW or a Porsche, what kind
of dresses to wear, all sorts of things, only to abandon all these things when
we reach our destination – The Grave. We don’t realize in our life’s journey
that these are just burdens that we are carrying with utmost care and fear of
losing them, only to find that at the end they are useless and we can’t take
them with us.