When my daughters were young they
enjoyed watching Winnie the Pooh and his friends in all their adventures. We
even renamed our family members after the characters. My husband was Pooh
because he loves his honey and other sweets.
Our oldest was Tigger because she could hardly sit down, and our
youngest was Piglet just because she was a piglet kind of person and loved the
little, sweet creature. I was Rabbit since I could be such a fussy-pot.
Lately, though, I think I should
have been called Eeyore. Eeyore was that blue-gray donkey who could turn a
birthday party into a funeral. Do I need psychiatrist’s couch to explore the
root of my gloom? Probably not. I grew up in a rather Eeyore kind of family.
Things did happen, and we often seemed to hang on to those things rather than
choose the cheerful events. After a while I began just waiting for that second
shoe to drop. Often I felt like I stood under a centipede!
True enough, life has been
challenging in the past ten years as well. Disappointments I’ve never expected
have cropped up like mosquitoes after a rain in the middle of July. And I’ve
stayed in my Eeyore rut. Today our Saturday Sisters group focused on Ruth,
which included her mother-in-law Naomi. Both faced huge loses in their
lives—Ruth her husband and Naomi her husband and both sons. Too many funerals!
Naomi’s loss turned her bitter. The gloom got too gloomy, and she couldn’t see
the stars in the night sky.
 |
| Bright side: no specks! |
In his book People Can’t Drive You Crazy If You Don’t Give Them the Keys author
Mike Bechtle mentions that this life is full of downsides. Everything, really,
has one. If you eat a bowl of ice cream, eventually you get to the sad bottom
of it. If you go on vacation, you must go home. If you start a good book (and
keep reading), you come to the end. Bechtle has his family play the bright-side
game. This happened, but here’s the bright side.
Honestly, I’ve always had an
aversion to such Pollyanna games; they seem so happy-dappy-sappy, so positive thinking.
Something like an anti-reality game. Now I wonder. Life is so much about what
goes on in our heads, the constant head chatter we do. Chattering properly is
key to how we live our lives. What goes on up there is what comes out sooner or
later.
This morning I woke up with a headache
and the challenge of presenting a characterization of Ruth for our ladies
group. It was something different for the group, and I didn’t know how I would
do or how it would go over. But for the second whole day in a row (Yes, every
new habit has to begin somewhere.), I laid in bed and thought of five things I
was grateful for. Both days I’ve noticed something—it’s hard to stop once I get
started. I could focus on the headache, but I was also thankful for all the
dear friends who would show up at breakfast and what God could do through my
weakness and inadequacy, which was ample today.
It’s really not a game. It’s a
battle. To look around us and recognize the brokenness of the world and the
flies that always seem to find the ointment, the aphid that find my tomato
plants isn’t hard. But to buck what I often focus upon to see the bright
side—my tomatoes that so far don’t have specks, or my beautiful impatiens in back growing better
than the ones in front, or to see the stars in the sky set off magnificently by
the black sky—that is a choice.
That’s where God wants
me to live, and I know it. That’s the walk of faith.
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