I love the Winnie the Pooh books. They are delightfully wholesome and whimsical. You can start those books in a bad mood, but you sure can’t finish them in one. Winnie the Pooh is also one of those rare occasions where the original Disney movie is just as delightful in its own right. And I was surprised to find a rather poignant parallel to our own lives in a recent rewatch.
One of the best known scenes in both book and movie is a particular episode where Pooh, being kind of a terrible house guest if I’m honest, eats rabbit out of house and home and becomes too fat to fit back out the door. Wedged so tight Pooh can’t get out, Christopher Robin declares that the only thing to do is wait for Pooh to get thin again.
That’s when Rabbit (the real victim in this story if you ask me) starts trying to cope.
Desperate to have his home as normal as possible, Rabbit tries all sorts of tactics to deal with the bear butt in the room. First, he rearranges his chair so he doesn’t have to look at it. But when that proves impossible, he starts trying to make Pooh’s hindquarters a part of the house, almost as if they were there on purpose. He uses Pooh’s legs for towel pegs, sets a frame around him, sticks twigs and a shelf around him, paints a moose face on Pooh’s behind, and tries to make him a hunting trophy that will blend in.
But Pooh, who was never going to be able to hold that still sneezes and the whole project gets destroyed. Everything rabbit had put together goes flying and he’s left with a mess and a Pooh Bear that’s not going away anytime soon.
Watching Rabbit sit in the mess of his own house, trying desperately to mask a big bear butt sticking through his door, I was suddenly struck by how similar I look trying to solve my problems or deal with sin in my life by myself.
Now I’m not suggesting Winnie the Pooh is intended as a Christian allegory. I’m especially not suggesting that Winnie the Pooh himself represents sin. He is, after all, just a bear of very little brain. Let’s not get drastic here or anything.
But some time or another we’ve all been Rabbit. We’ve all had some nasty thing in our life, whether it’s a past wrong, a terrible decision, a regret, a temptation we can’t seem to shake, a lie, a mistake, you name it. And we’ve all wanted the presence of it, or even the painful reminder of it gone. We’ll do just about anything to get that problem to disappear and the sooner the better. We’ve all been there at some point. Maybe that’s you right now.
The problem is, given how messed up we humans are, we simply aren’t capable of effectively handling the messes in our lives. They’re just bigger than us. We can’t get the bear out of the door. Now this is where we really get like Rabbit. In these moments, we’re faced with two options: Call for help, or hide the problem. Guess which one we tend to pick?
You don’t need me to tell you how well hiding the problem works. You already know it doesn’t. Sure, we might be able to conceal the problem for a little while. Usually just long enough to start patting ourselves on the back for a job well done. But all too soon it will all come crashing down again and the mess will be bigger than ever. Dress it up, make use of it, or look away all you want, but a problem in your house is still a problem in your house until you deal with it.
So if hiding it doesn’t work, that leaves the other option: call for help.
Quite frankly, this should have been our first choice, but flawed as we are it rarely is. Unfortunate, considering it’s not only the best thing for us but that God’s also standing at the ready, wanting with all of his love to get us out of our mess. He is so eager to take on our troubles and free us from the problem. If I included every bit of scripture that supported that notion this would be a very long blogpost indeed.
And God doesn’t do the job halfway. No dressing up the bear butt as a hunting trophy in God’s kingdom. God’s not in the business of hiding our problems, his aim is to fix them. That’s why we need his help more than anything. Because if we want a total change, we need a total solution and nothing short of the King of the universe will do.
How that might look will differ for all of us. God is, after all, a very creative God who uses many things to do His will. For some of us, he will bring just the right group of people into our lives, the last ones we would have expected but the very ones who are uniquely equipped to help us take steps forward. For others, it will be God giving us constant reminders of his Word and what he’s trying to tell us until we can’t run from it anymore. And for even more it will be any manner of uniquely, personal methods of getting our attention and working the problem.
But we have to let God in the house to deal with the bear butt.
We have to set aside our pride that says “I can do it! I can fix this myself” and be willing to accept help. This is so hard because it always requires us to come to terms with the limits of our own strength, which usually means realizing how little of it we ever had in the first place. But from that place something glorious can happen. God’s grace meets us right where our strength ends, and he doesn’t hesitate to shoulder the load if we give it to him.
Let God deal with your mess, Christian. There’s no one better equiped to handle it.
‘Each time he said, “My grace is all you need. My power works best in weakness.” So now I am glad to boast about my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ can work through me.’ 2 Corinthians 12:9
Let’s find some joy,
A
Avalon Robinson Author 