Are You Too Rushed to Discover?
This is the amazing and majestic Ruby Falls in Chattanooga, Tennessee. (Photo credit to my brother.)
It was discovered by accident, the way many things are. The man who found it was trying to get to the known Lookout Mountain cave, far below the one containing Ruby Falls.
But then the drill hit air, long before they expected it to.
So Leo Lambert goes down into the hole they've discovered, because that's what all sane and rational people think of doing when they find a small, dark crawl space 200 feet below the earth's surface.
He's got to crawl to see what's down there because the hole they'd discovered wasn't very tall.
The man crawls for seven hours before he was finally able to stand up. I'm not even willing to sit in traffic for seven hours.
Seventeen hours after he and his lantern went in, he comes out with an amazing tale of an underground waterfall. Then he does what any other 1920s husband of normal character would do. He takes his wife down there.
She sees the waterfall, agrees it's awesome, and they name it after her (her name was Ruby).
They did eventually dig down to the cave they were looking for, but all the while they start digging out a path to Ruby Falls that doesn't involve slithering through rock on your belly.
Once they got it ready for the public, the lower cave was soon forgotten next to the inspiring uniqueness of Ruby Falls.
Just imagine. For centuries this beautiful, majestic site was known only by God and a handful of salamanders.
If Leo Lambert had been a less patient man, it would still be unknown today. How many of us get upset when something detracts us from our end goal? How many of us would have kept crawling until we found the falls?
Sometimes distractions are just that, but sometimes God throws a stone in our path because He has something better planned. Something we couldn't begin to imagine. But like Leo Lambert, we have to be a little different from the rest of the world in order to go discover it.