This is not a children’s story.

For years I have shared in the mowing responsibilities of our church property.  It is a large piece of property and requires about 2-3 hours of time to complete the job. I have spent so many hours over the past 22 years on a riding mower, going back and forth, singing, praying or just lost in thought over the current events in my life.  It has become like the commute to work – you ask yourself, how did I get here?

I actually like to mow – I know  weird. My allergies do not like it and my arthritis definitely hates it – but I like the sense of accomplishment mowing brings.  As you start you can see the impact you make on the “field”. I usually divide it up into sections and complete sections at a time.  Soon, I can see that I have accomplished more than what is left to be done and that pushes me to finish.  Once complete, I can look back and see all that I have done over the last few hours.  But during this time I am often either singing along with music or deep in thought so I am not often “watching” what I am doing.

Enter last Saturday.

We try to mow each week – but weather and schedule will often interrupt this plan.  That was the case last week.  By Saturday, the grass was relatively high and there were also several areas where clumps of dried grass from the last mowing were laying in the field.  As I began my routine, ear phones in, singing along with Pandora’s Broadway tunes, I went tooling along for about 20 minutes when all of a sudden….in a very deep part of the grass… I hit something and it was so much of a “something” that it just about stalled the mower.  I have never “mowed over”  anything like this before and the grass was so high I could not immediately see what it was.  On my return trip, I saw white, gray and red “stuff” thrown in the area I had just passed through.  UGH…. I ran over a bunny!  I looked away, sick to my stomach. I purposely avoided this patch of grass for the next several minutes and mowed in a different direction until I saw my hubby join me with the trimmer.  I drove up and told him…”I think I hit a bunny nest in the back of the field”.  He grimaced with me. I continued to mow – not near the scene of the murder, but in all other areas of the field.  He continued to trim.

Eventually, it became impossible to avoid the pain of cleaning up my mess.  In the meantime I was so sad that I had hurt and killed this bunny and/or the little ones hiding in the grass. .  I didn’t want to mow over them again….. yuck… so I guess a shovel and a husband who didn’t want to see the massacre either, was my only option.  I asked him to help me, and he said show me where you hit them.  So we walked back to the site, I told him he couldn’t miss it, and he gingerly peered into the high unmowed grass.  He turned around and smiled at me…apparently, I had obliterated a baseball.  Not a bunny.  The entrails I thought I saw was the stuffing, the red –  the stitching. Stop laughing at me!  I am from the city, how do I know what a mowed bunny looks like?

Relief, and laughter, came next.  One of many times that I have asked my husband to rescue me from some scary thing in my life, only to find out it wasn’t what I had imagined “it” to be.  In this case, I am certainly glad it was not what I imagined and that the baseball was my only casualty.  But this does beg the question about things we are afraid to look at in our lives.  What is happening  that you are afraid to look at or afraid to take off the shelf of “I will deal with this later” in your life?  We all have these items.  These feelings, These relationships.  And maybe, some of them are not ones that can be dealt with and maybe some of them can be.  Maybe you need someone to look at them for and with you – just like my husband looked at my destruction of a…. ahem… baseball. Do you have someone like that in your life?  If not, can you find someone to walk alongside of you as you peer at the messy stuff?

Unemployment is messy.  It raises so many questions for people about self worth, about the future, about value and about money.  Some of those things are scary – but if you invite another person to look at the situation you are in with you, you might be able to see it more clearly or at least less emotionally. I am working on that.  I continue to believe that I don’t need to “worry” about money, that I can trust God in this area.  I continue to believe that this situation is not intended to harm me, but to prosper me – and it has. I continue to watch for what is next for me – job or no job.  And I continue to be thankful for those that who walk alongside of me – God, my family and my friends – as I look at how I feel about myself and the value of employment.  I invite you to do the same – and do as I say not as I do, so that you don’t obsess over a dead bunny when it is only a destroyed baseball.

I am now known to my husband has the “baseball killer”……hush! I mean really – can’t you see entrails and blood in this picture?