Last Friday evening my dear sister, Margaret drove from Virginia Beach to visit for the weekend. Due to a long traffic delay she did not stop by my house as planned but instead went directly to our mutual friend’s house for dinner.
After a rather humorous texting exchange, I received a simple, “Am stick in the mud.”
Thinking she had arrived safely at our destination yet was simply perturbed by the journey taking so much longer than anticipated (in addition to my having to say goodbye to our beloved Great Pyrenees the day before) I replied, “Wait, that’s my job!”
I am quite sure I thoroughly confused her.
Since I have known Margaret, mind you, she has NEVER been a “stick in the mud.” She makes me laugh so hard, whether in her physical presence or not, that my stomach generally ends up hurting. On occasion other things happen too, anatomically speaking, which I won’t describe here yet which can be a somewhat predictable legacy of childbirth, natural or otherwise.
In my self-absorbed and irrationally optimistic state, I casually passed a vehicle in a rather unusual position in a yard to my left, which was in the correct (but very dark) neighborhood near our friend’s house. A fleeting thought entered my mind, “Huh . . . that kinda looks like her truck.”
I could go on to tell you how long it took me to realize that it was actually my sister’s car, but it’s a bit humiliating. All was well – aside from the fact that it appeared that she had accidentally done some serious four-wheeling after pulling in the wrong driveway.
Ironically, the next morning Margaret and I read Buechner’s devotional entitled, “The need to praise” in which he described an experience on a bitterly cold and rainy winter’s morning in Alabama with his Army training battalion. Mud was everywhere, and a infantry man nearby had discarded a turnip. Still hungry after dinner, Buechner picked it up and ate it- mud and all. He goes on to summarize this surprisingly “key moment,”
“Sitting there in the Alabama winter with my mouth full of cold turnip and mud, I could see at least for a moment how if you ever took truly to heart the ultimate goodness and joy of things, even in their bleakest, the need to praise someone or something for it would be so great that you might even have to go out and speak it to the birds of the air.”
It occurred to me that this is not unlike the message in Kelly McGonigal’s Ted Talk about stress in which she discusses how we can transform its effect on us by the way we choose to look at it. She argues that stress – although not chronic stress – can be a good thing. In fact she says it has the same “biology” as courage and joy.
Whether we are literally stuck in the mud or figuratively so during a season of our lives, our experience of humiliation and suffering can likewise be transformed if we choose to look at it as an irreplaceable opportunity which can both nourish and refine us – not through sheer human will, I believe, but through God’s shattering grace.
Our lives are messy, plain and simple and we spin our wheels in the muck and mire trying to furiously get out of it. In so doing, however, we often simply sink deeper and miss out on the sweet fruit (or vegetable!) God has for us in the midst of it.
Is there a turnip close at hand in a muddy trench? Go on, take a bite – mud and all. You may feel the need to praise someone or something for it.
And you may discover, as Buechner did, that not only was the turnip good but the mud was good, too.
– Caroline Watkins
