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Wednesday, September 12, 2012

A Fall in the Mud


Sometimes things don’t turn out the way I’d hoped.
A job doesn’t pan out. The car breaks down. I can’t attend that special event. No one notices me.

Life is filled with ups and downs. Disappointments play teeter-totter with success. Confidence and insecurity duke it out in a game of tug-of-war.
Should minor bumps in our lives define who we are? Do we allow today’s discouragement to affect how we live tomorrow?

In the movies, we’ve all seen the humorous scenario where someone is chasing a person or an animal, and down they go, right into a soupy brown wallow of mud. It’s good for a laugh. But the person falling down isn’t laughing. We see delight in it because it isn’t us!
The mud is there. The person falls in, often getting a face-bath of muck. And the thing is, they hop up and continue chasing the dog—or whatever. There’s something about shaking ourselves free of the grime and getting back to the business of living. We’re not going to stay in that situation, covered in mud. It happened. Get on with life. Take one step forward in front of the other until your footing is steady again.

These things do test us. Some would even say they add character.
I guess laughing long and hard after a setback might be the perfect solution. But for most of us, it’s going to take a day or two before we’re ready to laugh about falling in the mud.
As a believer, I know God has a good plan for my life. Some things that happen I don’t understand. But I don’t want to wallow in the situation, regardless. Even though I’m tempted to.

Oh, boy.
What I need to do is get up and get going. Again. And again.

Annie sings that old familiar phrase, “The sun will come out tomorrow.”
Bad things do happen. But so do good things. Sometimes, lots of good things. And we call these blessings.

Occasionally, there’s a mud hole. A flop. A loss. A disappointment.
So I say to myself, get out of the mud asap. Trust God. Walk forward. Good is surely on its way.