Pushing the Boulder

There’s a story told about a man who has a dream one night. In the dream, the Creator shows him a boulder and tells him, "I want you to go out and push that boulder." So in the morning, the man gets up, finds the boulder near his home, and starts to push it. He pushes it for a day, a week, a month, a year, two years. After two years, however, he gets tired of pushing the boulder. In fact, he’s completely forgotten about his dream.

And so he lives out his life and eventually passes on.

When he comes to the Gates Upstairs, he is greeted by a group of angels who tell him, "Sorry, you didn't finish your work on Earth. You're going to have to go back down again.”

Stunned and upset at the angels’ pronouncement, the man asks, "What do you mean, I didn’t finish my work? What is it that I didn't do?”

The angels say, "You were told to push the boulder. You were told to do your work. You were told that it doesn't matter what’s at the end of the road; what matters is the effort along the way. The Creator didn’t tell you to move the boulder. That's His job. He told you to push the boulder.”

The boulder in this story is a metaphor for the individual roles we need to fill and the efforts we are called to make in our lives. Creator doesn’t ask us to create perfect outcomes. That is not our job. Our job is to be involved in the process. Our job is to strive each day to come closer to eradicating as much negativity as we can.

It’s only by doing the small steps for ourselves, by striving to increase our love and decrease our agenda by perhaps one degree each day, that we can together change the world.