It will be remembered that when Moses’s, with God’s help,  convinced Pharo to let the Jews leave Egypt the Jews were obliged to walk for a time in the desert. After just a short period of time, Moses left the Jews to go to the top of the mountain and receive instruction from God.  While Moses was gone, the jews lost faith in both Moses and God and built a Golden Calf To worship.  It became obvious to both God and Moses that the former slaves were not yet ready to build a nation of their own. They needed a time to prepare themselves physically and emotionally and to become stable enough to handle such work.
 The moral to be learned from this event was presented by Christ in the form of two parables.  In Luke 13, Matthew 13, and Mark 4, we are told that many people who had followed Christ’s activities were glad for the great things being done by him.  And then Jesus asked,  “What is the holy nation of God like?”  Then he asked, “What can I use to show you?  It is like a mustard seed which a man took and planted in his field.  It grew and became a tree.  The birds of the sky stayed in its branches.”  Again Jesus said, “What can I use to show you what the holy nation of God is like?  It is like the yeast of a woman who put it into three pails of flour until it was all full of the yeast.”
      What, you may ask, do these stories have to do with each other?  The answer is not a simple one.  Please allow me to explain it through the use of a story about something I have witnessed not very long ago: 
 Some friends of mine wanted to build a business using new scientific facts in such a way as to  as to help people recover from certain addiction disorders.  Their new approach was without using strong drugs or the horrors of aversion therapy. The drugs currently used by standard medical treatment today have numerous bad side effects.  The side effects include nervousness, fever, arthralgia, exfoliative dermatitis, dizziness, palpitations, high blood pressure and pulse changes, angina, cardiac arrhythmia, and a number of others I can’t even pronounce. Perhaps the worst of these is the fact that these drugs are themselves addictive and have become drugs of choice in the streets.  This stems from the fact that these drugs might be classified as amphetamines, or uppers.  The new approach my friends had developed uses common nutritional elements and does not  have any significant side effects.  
 Most business people I know confirm that such a development is of great value. And, realizing this,  my friends put together a company to market and sell their new adjunct to therapy.  After all, people have been looking for literally centuries for a means of helping people stop being alcoholics, opium addicts, and so forth.  My friends thus assumed that the world would beet a path to their door.  This was not to be the case.  It seems doctors have to worry a great deal about law suits. If any treatment they choose has not been approved by the FDA they can, and usually will, be sued the for malpractice even if the treatment works!  The lawsuit might state for instance that if commonly accepted treatments been used, the patient would have suffered less, been cured faster, or at much less expense.  Thus, the prudent Dr. chooses the accepted practice rather than risk some new treatment.  And, of course, as my friends’ procedure did not have a new patentable molecule, it would be impossible to get investors to provide many tens of millions of dollars to get FDA approval of their system.  
      Then, they discovered a way to get around this problem.  It seems there are about 5 percent of the medical doctors who will risk using a new treatment modality  if it has been tried and proven with a double-blind placebo controlled study. Such a study would have to be conducted at a university and the cost would be several tens of thousands of dollars rather than several tens of millions of dollars.  And, in time, my friends were able to find people willing to invest sufficient funds for a proper scientific study to be done.

     It turned out that there were a number of problems they had not yet solved, most importantly:
 

1)   It seems that while they were not aware of it, it is well known that the recovering addict actually has three problems.  a) The compulsion to use the addictive substance, b) an habitual desire to use it, and c)  the problem that all of his friends and associates use it.  Thus, if he stops, he will be subject to a strong physical imperative, well established habits, the ritacule of close friends.  In short, they had solved the compulsion issue, but not the other two.  2)   Making nutritional supplements for sale to third parties requires a manufacturing  process and plant which has been approved by the FDA.  The usual cost is over $10,000,000 and that is just for the approval process.  Then you need the actual plant and inventories.    3)   The ingredients have to be purchased from a source that is consistantly 99.6% or better pure (pharmaceutical grade) without fail.  4)    Finding out how to sell the product, e.g. to whom, how, at what price, etc., had to be determined.  5)   Acquiring the needed personnel to make, sell, and deliver the product, and, of course, the administrative people to manage the facility, do the accounting, etc.

     As Christ had explained in the twin parable of the mustard and the seed, from small beginnings great things can grow, and grow and graw.  However, their continued growth requires the things that only God can give to create new life.  And thus, the work of my friends to eliminate addiction continues to grow and grow.  With each step, taken with God’s help, their work| becomes more fruitful. However, whenever they they leave Him out of their work, they meet new and greater blockages to their work.

Soloist sings:  When I grow weary and troubled, He will be there.

      I urge my friends, and all of you in a similar position, do not forget Him in your moments of success as well as those of difficulty.