Making A Mountain Into A Molehill

There is an Ancient Greek myth of a man named Sisyphus who was doomed by the gods for all eternity to push a boulder up a hill only to have it roll down once it got to the top and he’d have to start all over again. There are character flaws, or weaknesses of the flesh, or sins and temptations which do easily beset us, or physical or emotional or mental wounds and illnesses that we are in a constant battle with and against which it seems there is no hope for any lasting victory. Again and again we fight and we struggle and we pant and we heave as we try to push this boulder all the way to the top of the hill, but we stumble and we falter and we let the boulder slip through our grasp and it rolls all the way back down. It seems like all of our efforts were for naught, that nothing we do ever seems to matter very much. But here’s the thing. Little by little, one tiny fleck of dust at a time, the boulder we push up the hill starts to erode. We may not notice it the first or the seventh or the four hundred and ninetieth time, but the more and more times we push that boulder up the hill, the smaller and smaller it gets. Not only that, but just as the boulder begins to erode, so too does the hill. It may take us thousands or millions of times of fighting that same battle, overcoming that same weakness, pulling that same thorn out of our flesh, rolling that same boulder up the hill, but eventually that huge, massive boulder is scraped down until it’s no larger than a marble, and that hill which so many times seemed higher than a mountain, has been whittled down until it’s now no larger than a molehill. Whether we’ve fallen seven or seventy times seven times, our efforts are not wasted.