A Crabby Perspective

A friend of mine recently gave me this illustration. He said he was out fishing for crabs and needed a bucket. He couldn’t find one with a lid but the guy he was going crabbing with told him, “ You won’t need a lid. Crabs are losers. “ He promised he would see what he meant once they got their first crabs. Sure enough he said, they were losers. As soon as a crab started to climb out of the bucket another crab would pull him back down. 

The illustration has obvious lessons doesn’t it? Don’t let the people we hang around pull us down. 

But those lessons depend on one huge presupposition, that being in the bucket is a bad thing. Admittedly, it seems bad. The crab is going to get cooked and eaten if he stays in the bucket. That sounds bad except that I believe he was created for that very purpose. Perhaps his crabby friends are only helping him fulfill one of the chief reasons for his existence. 

I understand the analogy and even agree with it. But I do see another lesson from a different perspective. We need people in our lives who help us fulfill the purpose for which God created us. The corrupted nature of man constantly strives to climb out of the will of God and make themselves something God never intended, to be their own gods, the masters of their own destiny. Thank God for those people who remind us to stay in the will of God. 

In this respect I see a few buckets a person is best to stay in:

Marriage

God has designed marriage to be one man and one woman for a lifetime. There are numerous temptations that make us seem like this bucket is small, confining and maybe dragging us down. We need friends to keep us in our bucket. 

Work

If a man won’t work neither should he eat. We would like to rationalize that to refer to the ne’er do well. The man who climbs his way to financial independence or works his way to an early and prosperous retirement must be excluded, right? I am not so sure. To become financially able to serve God more freely is certainly advisable. To become free enough to spend time and money in a vacation for the rest of one’s life would be a terrible waste of God’s will. 

Church 

It is impossible to put a group of people into a tight community like a church without some disagreements and disputes. The devil would love to convince the Christian that he could do better without the confinements of the local church. The matter of fact is that God created that church specifically to provoke us to love and Good works. Someone needs to keep pulling us into the unity of the local church. 

I’m not criticizing the first application of the illustration. We would do best to avoid friendships that pull us down into sin. But the friend who keeps us in the will of God is no loser.