Weekend Walkabout
It rained off and on all day Friday. The remnants of Tropical Depression Cindy finally blew through at about 7:30 in the evening. I went for a drive up over the far ridge and picked berries till I got to a place where a tree was down across the road. I hooked up a heavy duty tow line but it had landed right beside another tree and was locked in like a gate. So I backed up a ways and did a three-point turn to get out of there. Right about then, my phone went crazy with tornado watches and severe thunderstorm warnings. The sky opened up as soon as I got home. All told, we got an inch and a half of rain overnight which was good because we were getting pretty dry.
I met my high school girlfriends for coffee yesterday morning which is always a delight. I won’t get to see most of them till fall. I went for a drive in the afternoon and bought a couple hummingbird feeders as mine developed a leak. Then I stopped at this little hole in the wall BBQ joint in a nearby college town for the best…ribs…EV-ER! Got home and went for a long walk as the evening cooled then settled in here on the porch to watch the lightning bugs. It was another beautiful day in paradise!
As I was walking along the little two-lane blacktop by the farm, I got to thinking about yesterday’s post about patience and realized patience, or rather…the lack thereof, is really all about control. Not control as in controlling your temper. I’m talking that illusion we so often carry with us that somehow we have control in this life. There are somethings we do have control over. Our reactions. Our attitudes. Our immediate needs to a certain extend. If we fail to “save for a rainy day”, we’ve passed up an opportunity to control our spending. My patience runs thin when others don’t do things on my time line and that’s where we get into trouble. The girls and I were discussing this at coffee yesterday. My point was “I want what I want and I want it now. I ALSO want what I want and I want it NOW. I try. I really try to remember what a doctor told me once. He was counseling Hubby #2 and I when we were having an amniocentesis. We were talking about our older daughter and how we were trying to get her to do some such thing…I don’t remember what now. He said, “Here, let me write this one piece of advice down for you. It will absolutely change your life and you’ll never forget it.” He proceeded to pull out a 3x5 card, wrote something on it and handed it to us. It read…“Give up all illusions that you have control of your children after they’re 13.” So true. Oh, there was a little more control when we could take away the car keys. But other than that, if you don’t have the good stuff in them long before they turn 13, you’ve gone way past the cutoff date.
I can’t control anyone. I can’t even control myself sometimes. Control is an ill-conceived illusion of power where there is none and causes more problems in relationships that anything else, in my opinion. Money quarrels…control. Housework conflicts…control. Relationship issues…many are just power struggles. So how do you give up control? Heck if I know. I’m still working on patience. I suppose the best way to give up control is to ask God to help you remember that HE is in ultimate control and you’ll keep trying to move out of his way. When you let go of a kite, it will fly straight and true. But if you try to hang onto the tail, it’s not going anywhere. Practice, practice, practice. You’d think we’d have this all figured out by this age, wouldn’t you? ❤️
“Then Jesus said to his disciples: “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat; or about your body, what you will wear. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothes. Consider the ravens: They do not sow or reap, they have no storeroom or barn; yet God feeds them. And how much more valuable you are than birds! Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to your life? Since you cannot do this very little thing, why do you worry about the rest?” Luke 12:22-26 NIV