What Lawn Mowers Think About

This summer, since I don't have a job outside the home, I've kinda taken it upon myself to do the yard work. I kind of figure that if Scott is going to go off to work all day, every day to support our little family, the least I can do is to make the house and yard look nice when he gets home. It makes me feel productive, makes the house look nice, and gives me some much-needed exercise and fresh air, so about once a week I go out and tame the yard. That being said, I spent the better part of today outside cutting the grass. All of it. It takes a couple of hours and wears me out, because the yard is thick and not at all shady and just hilly enough to be irritating, but nothing beats the feeling of looking back over the whole yard as I wheel the mower back into the shed and seeing what I have accomplished. So yes....as you might have guessed, the lawn mower in question here is not the big red Craftsman push mower with which I spent my day. The lawn mower here is me, and these are my thoughts. Silly. Machines don't think! =)

I've been thinking a lot about my situation lately. Looking for a job, waiting for the call, and hoping beyond hope that something will come through.... As I mentioned last week, I've been dealing some with the idea that rather than trusting God to fix this, I might just be rationalizing my own laziness. I feel better about that now. I've prayed about it and have come to a sense of peace that at least for now, I'm doing what I should be doing. I've had several people tell me lately - without me even mentioning the troubling thought that I have become a lazybones - that I should wait for something good to come along, because I didn't go to college and work that hard to just be miserable doing menial things for someone else. Scott says he wants me to be happy wherever I am, and he doesn't want me to settle for just anything. I'm okay.

I babysat for our two youngest nieces yesterday morning. Carlie is just a little over a year old, walking now, and is showing so much curiosity about the world. Jesse, her big sister, will be 3 in December and is in the middle of that famous 2 year-old's independent streak. I don't want to call it the "terrible twos," because I don't think it's a terrible thing when you realize what essential life processes they're going through at that point in their development. In any case, Jesse - while adorable and an absolute doll - is definitely exercising her independence and testing the limits of everyone around her. At lunch yesterday, for example, all she wanted were her grapes and apple juice. She showed no interest in any of the other food on her plate and, while her sister devoured everything on her own tray, insisted that she was finished and wanted to get out of her high chair. I persisted, though, telling her that she could only get down once she ate something because I knew she had a doctor's appointment that afternoon and would get hungry in about a minute and a half if all she ate was grapes. In response, I got many persistent cries of, "NO!" and emphatic shakes of her head. Yes, her autonomy was in full swing. I finally relented, though, and freed her from her high-chair bondage when she got creative about what she would do with her food. Her little fingers are just the size of her nostrils, and when she demonstrated this to me I said (sounding like quite the adult), "Fingers out of the nose and food in the mouth, Jesse Claire." I turned back to Carlie for one second and when I looked at Jesse again, she had a humongous piece of turkey hanging from her nose. She apparently listened just enough to what I had said to be able to confuse it completely. In any case, she won her freedom with that little maneuver.

I, always seeking spiritual applications for things that happen around me (I think it's the youth minister and devotional writer that live inside of me) thought today about how I - at 25 years old - am not that different from Jesse. No, I don't hide food in my nose and I don't test the fit of my fingers in various facial orifices, but I do have a streak of independence in me that sometimes can get me into trouble. I think a lot of us are like that. Even if we say we are followers of Christ and pray regularly for guidance from God, I think we often test our human independence and remind everyone of our God-given free will by screaming (even if only internally) "NO!" and not doing the very thing we hear from all directions is the best thing for us. We are stubborn....and of course, when I say "we," I mean me. I want to work, I want a family, I want to be superwife and someday supermom, and I want to do it all perfectly. I want this life I've envisioned for myself, and I cannot fathom that maybe - just maybe - that's not what's best for me. In thinking about this, I was reminded of a testimony given Sunday during open-mic time at church. A lady was talking about how she had been trying to get back to work for a long time but that she kept "running into brick walls," as she put it. Nothing was working out as she thought it should, and she was getting more and more frustrated with her situation until one day it dawned on her that maybe God didn't want her to go back to work. She had prayed and prayed that God would make the job work out for her, but she had never stopped and asked Him if He wanted her to go back to work to begin with. The brick walls were God, and He was trying to show her that working isn't what she needs to be doing right now, but she interpreted it all as a test of her own perseverance.

This rang so true with me, and seemed consistent somehow with Jesse's insistence that turkey wasn't what she needed yesterday (unless it was in her nose). Not to make a dangerous comparison of myself with God, but to make a point, I - like God - knew that what Jesse needed to do was to eat her food, or else she would get extremely hungry at an inopportune time. Jesse, though, was only concerned with her own agenda. All she knew or cared about was that I had interrupted her play time to try to get her to eat, and that if she refused to eat she could get back to her merriment. Similarly, God knows what we need - whether it's food or work or leisure or simply to be taught a lesson - but we make it difficult for Him to take care of us when we insist that we know the better way. I don't think that God doesn't want me to work. He has shown me in many ways that I definitely need something like a job to occupy my time, both for the health of my mind and our checking account, and I know that He wants me to work somewhere. It never occurred to me, though, to actually ASK HIM what He wanted me to do, or to ASK HIM where He wanted me to be. I interpreted feelings and "signs" as I wanted to, and have seen the opposition I have encountered along the way as God's way of teaching me patience and of introducing me to corporate America. It never occurred to me until Sunday when I heard Sherry's testimony that maybe I've been having selective hearing when it came to listening to God, and I never realized the uncanny resemblance I have to a 2 year-old.

I don't know if that makes any sense whatsoever. Maybe I was out in the sun too long today.