In the old days when travelling circuses had elephants, they used to restrain them by chaining them to a peg in the ground. People often wondered why the huge elephant didn’t just pull the peg out of the ground and escape. The reason was that as a baby elephant he was tied to a huge stake that he couldn’t pull out. Weeks of trying only wore a trench around the stake, and finally it gave up. The result was that when the elephant had grown to its full size and had massive strength – more than enough to pull a peg out of the ground – it only remembers the futility of past efforts and doesn’t even try. It’s been conditioned to failure.
Just as many of us are, even though we have capacities we’ve never dreamed of. We need to remember those powerful words of Jesus: ‘If you can believe, all things are possible.’