New Seasons – Day 3

Everyone knows about the Leaning Tower of Pisa in Italy. This popular historical landmark is worth its weight in gold to the Italian tourism industry. Years ago, engineers noticed that the tower was slowly but surely, by millimetres at a time, starting to lean to one side. They began to worry that the tower would collapse completely. Each year, the tower leaned further and further south. They tried everything to stabilise the tower but nothing would help. In 1990, they were so afraid that it would fall that it was decided to temporarily close the tower to visitors. In 1992, someone suggested that they should try something completely different to save the tower. They decided to slightly straighten the tower to a safer angle by slowly extracting tons of sandy soil from one side of the tower, while steel cables held the tower. This plan was so successful that the tower is now the straightest it has been in hundreds of years. The initial attempts failed, because they were so caught up in the negative implications of the tower leaning over that they actually made the problem worse. When they started thinking about the whole situation differently, they achieved positive results.

When we have a problem or challenge, we often spend a lot of time and energy trying to find a solution. We do damage control to fix everything that’s gone wrong, but the crisis never really goes away. This story tells us to focus on the positive in the situation, rather than the negative. When we are not spending all our energy on the negative, we have more than enough strength to find a solution.

This is what the Bible teaches us. We must learn to look up, away from our crises and focus on Jesus. He triumphed over sin – live in his love, instead of focusing on negative things!