You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body and knit me together in my mother’s womb. Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex! Your workmanship is marvelous – how well I know it.
– Psalm 139 13-14
Homeownership is not for the faint of heart. I recently made the leap and purchased my first home, something I’d always said I had no interest in doing alone (you know, one of the many things on the list of what I’ll do when I remarry). Well, it happened. I did it. After the long journey of open houses, offers, disappointments and then a nerve-wracking day of squeezing a pen in my clammy hand during closing, I checked off one more thing that I was done waiting for Mr. Right to partake in. There I was; just me and a house…and a dog.
The excitement of having my own space to make new memories, meet new neighbors and spiff up to agree with my tastes was thrilling juxtaposed with the weight of responsibility. The hot water tank looks pretty rusty and the lawn was more of a sand pit, but yay, homeownership!
Now, speaking of the lawn, I had managed to rake the crispy leaves into piles and willed some decent grass to grow. My outdoor space was slowly morphing into my little sanctuary. I quickly concluded that if I could own a home on my own, I could certainly maintain the lawn. Off I went, purchasing gadgets and tools to take manual labor into my own small, not-yet-calloused hands. I instantly fell in love with mowing the lawn. Before you roll your eyes, compare it to those insane people who say going for a run is a stress reliever. Mowing the yard had become mine. The Florida heat is real, but gripping the handle and forcing the mower through the grass was empowering.
The problem? The weeds. My weed whacker came in a slender box and was chopped into three pieces. I busted out my pink electric drill and snapped the pieces together, leaving out a couple screws (they were so tiny, so probably not even needed, right?) I’m no perfectionist. The sun was setting, and I needed these lanky weeds gone before sundown. They were an eyesore along the border of my manicured lawn. You know how eyebrows shape a face, well my weeds were sorely misshaping my lawn.
Anyway, every time I continued to use the weed whacker, sharp sticks and weeds shot out at my shins like bullets ricocheting off a wall. By the time the lawn was all one height, tiny cuts covered my legs. They weren’t deep cuts, but they stung a little. I tried to be more careful the next few times I used the weed wacker, but I never gave it much thought for the year that I managed my lawn. This was all just a part of getting my hands dirty, or so I thought.
It wasn’t until I decided that my sidewalk needed a makeover, that I pulled out the flimsy weed whacker manual to learn how to morph it into an edger- something the outside of the box had promised was possible. As I skimmed the annoyingly-small images, I noticed something different about the picture. It didn’t look like my weed whacker. Either the picture was wrong, or my assembly was. It was the latter. I had attached the shield backwards, so it wasn’t acting as a shield at all! I had endured the tiny cuts on my legs all because I failed to use the tool as it was meant to be used. I could chalk this up as a blonde moment or “typical me” rushing through assembling things, but it hit me. With every tool, object or piece of complicated technology, there is a maker. There is an intended way for it to operate.
Could my silly little lawn maintenance story reveal a bigger picture that we have an author of our lives that created us for specific reasons and purposes? No matter how trivial my weed whacker story may sound, yep, I’m going to draw the correlation! The author of life has a specific purpose for his creation; his children. How unfortunate that some walk the earth, fumbling and getting by while never even realizing they are capable of so much more. Tiny cuts and scrapes may seem like no big deal, but what a revelation when one wakes up from the darkness and sees light.
There is a shield from the emptiness of life and instructions on how we’re meant to walk in fullness. Maybe it’s time to slow down and realize that the right way could take a little longer, but the scrapes and stings avoided along the way just might be worth it.
