How to Eat an Elephant

"The Lord protects the simplehearted; when I was in great need, He saved me." Psalm 116:6

There is only one way to eat and elephant: a bite at a time. Maybe you know that already. I didn't - until Beverly JOhnson told the world after she, the first woman to do so alone, reached the top of thirty-six hundred feet high El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, California.

"That's what I kept saying, 'A bite at a time, a bite at a time . . .'," the smiling Beverly said of her ten-day struggle up the gigantic granite mass that rises unbroken from the Yosemite Valley.

She was weary and afraid up there all alone, strapped with a hundred pounds of hear . . . climbing . . . climbing. Day after day she rose higher and higher, clutching to rocks and ropes self-hammered into the rock - praying that they would hold. What sleep she had was in slings on the sheer granite wall. "I often thought if I could magically leave, I would - "but there was no way but up.

She kept climbing, saying to herself, "I'll climb here today." You can't do it, she told reporters, if you count the days. "just a step at a time . . . a day at a time." she laughed victoriously, "and a bite at a time!"

We can all "eat elephants" by Beverly's formula, cant' we? It makes little difference whether it's all the things we have to accomplish, a test we have to take, a physical condition we have to live with, a broken heart that needs healing. Her reasoning works.

Haven't you often wished, as she did, that you could magically leave your problems? Most of us feel that way, but the world doesn't stop for us to get off. we dig in with whatever equipment we have; we work our way up slowly; and, remember this; we have the solid Rock to lean upon! God is always there.

By June Masters Backer, taken from "Women's Devotional Bible 2"