The Potential Beneath

By Peter Lundell –

I hiked Bryce Canyon and was awed while walking amidst the rock formations. Up to the edge of the canyon is a forest. And it’s flat. The canyon starts from a clear line of erosion along the edge of this forest. With an average of 200 days of freezing and thawing per year, it forms astonishing sculptures out of Dakota Sandstone.

All along its edge is that flat forest. Given enough time, the canyon will continue to widen where the forest now stands. The earth underneath the forest is the same as that in the canyon, but it’s still underground. As the trees erode or burn away, freezing and thawing water and ice will push chunks of rock apart to continually form new sculptures.

That whole forest has the potential to—and given enough time will—form these amazing features.

We often think of potential as something we strive to achieve. Bryce Canyon gives us the image that potential is underground, continually waiting to be uncovered. Our potential as people lies deep inside us, buried below social expectations, busyness, perhaps fear, and maybe laziness. That’s been true in me. It may be truer in you than you’d like to admit.

Could each of us be like Bryce Canyon? Like the flat forest, we may live a normal life and be little different from others. But dig away, patiently, for years, our whole life. What uniqueness or abilities or actions would we find?

I think most of us tend to give up too easily, or we get distracted, or burdened with the rest of life. I often have. Then I start in again. Focus! I shout at myself.

What’s buried beneath your surface? How has God uniquely created you?

And what are you willing to do in order to bring it out?

“Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen” (Ephesians 3:20-21 NIV).

“Lord, You know who I am better than I do. Work in me and lead me to erode away all that obscures and hinders what you would do with my life. I commit to fulfill my potential in Your hands.”