I peered into the darkness. Straining to see something, anything that would constitute a snake or bear or lion, tiger etc. I mean I know that this is East Texas but one can never be too far removed from the possibility that a lion or tiger might be nearby. Yes I know they are usually found in Africa or other non-American places but my imagination is vivid and I’m afraid of practically everything. I run from bees, wasps, hornets-basically anything that flies and gets near me. I’ve come dangerously close to cracking my head open trying to get away from a hornet. And that was recent, not like 20 years ago when I was 12 or something. It was just last weekend for crying out loud.
I told myself to focus and get back to the task at hand. Just put one foot in front of the other, in the pitch black darkness that surrounded us. A group of 10 of us were out in the middle of the night, in the woods hunting raccoons. Yes I said raccoons-or better known as coons here in East Texas. Let me just say: I am not a hunter, or much of an outdoorsy-type person. I try really hard to be but I’m awkward and clumsy. I could trip over thin air and get lost in a paper bag so the woods are not typically a place I hang out most days. When I’m not falling down or running from flying insects, I’m anticipating the next time that I will need to run and which direction I will go. That’s usually when I look up and notice everybody is about 30 yards ahead of me with a look of disgust on their face because I’m slowing everyone down.
Yeah so I’d say I’m about a -5 on a scale from 1 to 10 of “survivor” material. I’m not exactly a good candidate for a secluded island with no food or water and jungle animals. I’d probably just yell something out like, “Here I am! Dinner is served” and just die. But on this particular night I was hyped up and wasn’t quite ready to die. So onward we trudged through the eternal night looking for ‘Coons’ to shoot, for some reason or another. I guess they were going to eat them? I have no idea.
It was one bad situation after another and I practically cried the whole night. We had no light, my boots were about 5 sizes too big and they kept falling off, and of course I kept falling down. I thought I was a nice Christian girl but I was appalled at the things that were coming out of my mouth. Especially when we crossed a creek and there were snakes swimming on top. Can you imagine?
That little incident brought out the absolute worst in me. I was ashamed at how awful of a person I became in a matter of minutes. I went from nice little shy Christian girl to total crazy psycho with really big boots and a potty mouth. It was awful but mostly I was awful.
Honestly I think we all become the worst versions of ourselves when we end up in a really awful situation. I mean the kind of situation where you can’t see the light of day and everything that can go wrong goes wrong. And you are afraid-terribly afraid. We get squeezed by life and all kinds of horrible things come to the surface that we had no idea were there.
Sometimes I think that’s why God allows crummy situations an entrance into our boring lives. Awful situations are growth opportunities in disguise. They allow us a glimpse into our interior world so we can self adjust. It’s kind of like looking in a mirror. If you don’t like what you see, change it. So you have food on your face, clean it off. Broccoli in your teeth-floss it out. Bags under your eyes-use the concealer. You get the point. But we don’t always know we have issues if we don’t look in the mirror.
And most of the time, we are not seeing a true reflection of ourselves without God showing us. We see a self projected image-or what we WANT to see. The great thing about crummy situations is they strip away the layers of self projection and show us what’s really there. And that’s usually something we didn’t want to see. Which was the case with me.
Now my goal is to hold it together a little better. If I ever go on another hunting excursion, besides taking a sedative, I hope that I have progressed to a 0 on the survivor scale at least. I’d be happy to just get out of the negative side honestly.
What about you? Are you trapped in a crummy situation? Have you used that to your advantage and checked the mirror? Don’t wallow in self hatred because you don’t like what you saw. Use it as a catalyst to grow and improve. Allow the difficulty to show you what needs improvement and then allow God to help you in those areas. That’s the whole point-to get better through self adjusting and God’s help of course.
