Don’t Travel In A Barrel

Don’t Travel in a Barrel

Bible Blast: Read James 1:5-8

When you ask him, be sure that your faith is in God alone. Do not waver, for a person with divided loyalty is as unsettled as a wave of the sea that is blown and tossed by the wind. James 1:6

On this very date in 1901 Annie Edson Taylor did something incredible—and very dangerous. Annie was looking for a way to make some money, so she decided that at the age of sixty-three, she would be the first person to ever go over Niagara Falls in a barrel.

Annie had a barrel, crafted of oak and iron, made just for her trip. She padded it with a mattress. On her sixty-third birthday, October 24, 1901, Annie climbed into the barrel, clutching her favorite heart-shaped pillow. Her friends screwed down the lid, pumped some air into the barrel, and set Annie and her barrel in the water above the falls. The current carried her down, down, down into the rushing, roaring water. Of course, everyone was thrilled to see Annie still alive and well when they opened the barrel after her twenty-minute adventure ride. So she became the very first person ever to survive a trip over Niagara Falls in a barrel.

When Annie was interviewed about her trip, she said she would caution anyone against doing what she did and that she would never, ever want to make another trip over the falls.

Floating around a river in a barrel would be dangerous because you would have no control about where you went. The book of James says that’s like people who ask for God’s wisdom and then don’t do what God tells them. It’s like they say they believe God, but they act as if they believe more in themselves. That’s why they’re so unstable. They’re being tossed around by their own ideas, even though God has already given them clear answers and guidelines.

If you have to go on a river trip, take a boat that you can steer. In fact, let God steer you with his wisdom. Barrel travel is not the way to go.

Girl Gab: If you need wisdom about something today, ask God for it, and then act on that wisdom. Don’t doubt it.