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Maybe you remember the great scene from the movie “City Slickers.”  Billy Crystal plays a middle aged urban dweller named “Mitch” and Jack Palance plays a gruff cowboy named “Curly.”  The movie is about city guys who need some perspective in life, so they decide to take a vacation out west and participate in a cattle drive.  It’s a movie about finding what’s really important in life.

Curly helps Mitch discover the essentials with these words:  “You city folks, you worry about a lot of ‘stuff!’ (not really the word in the movie).  How old are you, 38?”  

Mitch replies, “39.”  

“Yeah, you all come up here around the same age, same problems.  You spend about 50 weeks a year getting knots in your rope, and then, and then you think two weeks up here will untie ’em for you.  None of you get it!  Do you know what the secret of life is?”

“No, what?” Mitch asks.

“This…” Curly then lifts his index finger up.

Mitch says, “Your finger?”

Curly responds, “One thing. . .just one thing.  You stick to that and everything else don’t mean ‘squat’ (again, I cleaned up the language!).

Mitch then asked the essential question:  “That’s great, but what’s the one thing?”

Curly smiles, shifts his cigarette, and says, “That’s what you’ve got to figure out!”

I think that many of us treat God as though He were a weekend getaway.  We spend all week tying ourselves into knots and then hope that an hour on Sunday in church will straighten out everything.  We need to figure out the “one thing” that changes our whole life. Continue reading →