What Meets My Eye Helping Define Positive Change

We have lots of great ideas, it goes around in your head and sometimes you even speak it out to someone close by, “I’d really like to……….”

You have the thoughts and yet that project (the invention in your head, writing, decorating, designing, learning to can, quilt, plan a visit with a friend, play an instrument) just hasn’t blossomed, nothing to show for your great ideas.

You are busy anyway, you would really like to, but….

In the spring we think of growing things, buying planters of gorgeous flowers or even planting a little garden.

We think of it.

Some of us actually do it.

I drove by a roadside place overflowing with hanging baskets, plantings and lots of people looking to do just that –          grow something….

I didn’t stop.

I have a shovel and gardening gloves.

I have packets of seeds.

I have reusable pots and bags of potting soil. I have numerous books, magazine clippings and great ideas.

A lot of life compares…  you have a ton of information, you were even taught, you know it, yet somehow you continue on, you drive right past and leave the shovel in the shed.

The way I see it you can have a ton of knowledge and all the right tools but at some point you have to make a decision.

Today might be a great day to decide to actually, really, grow something.

It was a simple idea, take this turn… seems shorter…we took this before, I think…. or at least someone I know did, maybe…
And we drive and turn and turn some more and we twist around narrow mountain roads as the sun sets and we wonder at what point did we make the wrong turn. We fear the gas needle as it lowers on the gauge. We wonder would it be best to turn back or continue on…surely it must not be too far; surely it comes out where we thought, just taking longer than expected. The scary questions left unspoken, the what if’s, running out of gas, lost in the dark, are most certainly on the tips of our tongues but we hold back. We wind and we twist and the mountains above make it difficult to even imagine the direction we are going or the direction to go. We persevere. The journey not at all what we had in mind as we started out and now feeling rather foolish we just want what has turned into “an adventure with a not so fun side” … to end.

While I have taken a few trips like this with my Mom (hehe) and of course a few in those Great Smoky Mountains with friends. It reminds me all too well of life.

Haven’t you like me, taken a few twists and turns that seem to get you nowhere? In fact they might even backtrack us a bit. We wonder what on earth were we thinking and as time goes on and the decision gets weighted with consequences, we can’t even begin to share our fears as we press on. Two little words that can make all the difference. Sometimes as we “press on”, we realize we just need to turn completely around and go back, humble ourselves, accept our foolishness and start over. Pressing on………..
Other times we find there is no going back, we don’t have the resources, it becomes out of the question and we must deal with that which lies ahead as we press on.

Overtime I’ve come to look at “miss-turns” and being “lost” on a drive as rather an adventure. I look instead for things to enjoy, an old farm, a new house, a quaint fence, a whimsical sign, a restaurant to come back to or a cutesie shop. Before long I sense something familiar and our seemingly lengthy tour of the unknown is over and we are back on track, we know the way.

I have to admit my life has been full of decisions that led me down some very unfamiliar and scary roads. I married and moved to a big city, me a small town mountain girl. I had jury duty in the middle of January on the south side of Chicago where they told us we couldn’t bring our cars unless we wanted to find them stripped and on blocks when we came out. I took little twin babies thinking I was adopting them only to get a call, just after they were crawling and had 8 teeth each, that in-fact they were adopted by someone else, the system was using me as a holding tank. I took a little mentally challenged kid I met at church, to Burger King, only to hear he had a lost twin. Sure enough he had and how could I imagine all that would be involved? Those little guys who wore a size 6x would become a part of my whole life forward, affecting so many others and how could I dream of them being almost 38! I had fights for rights of specials needs kids with more IEP meetings than I care to remember.
I tried like crazy to love well even when that one I followed clear to California to find his Mama that had deserted him as a kid, left with that girl he met on a day while I carried our second child. And I opened my front door one Good Friday, while tears were running down my face, to a man God sent, literally, to my front door. I said yes to phone calls asking me to open my heart and set yet another place at the table and all while the paperwork was piling up high like the laundry. I loved and lost and loved again. I prayed not to be barren and had three of my own. I decided my high school guidance counselor was wrong when she told me I showed no artistic ability and so we designed and built a couple of houses. And I cried my eyes out long and hard when the man God sent literally to my front door, had to go a 14 hours drive away just to make our financial ends meet and when they didn’t, that dream house had to go too. I feared and I feared my imaginations large and small. There were the months I felt like hiding under my bed but instead I prayed prostrate in my floor day and night for a child that had terribly lost his way. I packed and stored and moved and downsized, packed and sorted and unboxed some more. Along the way somehow I quit coloring my hair as an attempt to “go natural” and I joined a group of women who advertised they were meeting weekly to “go natural” too and I learned more in a few weeks time than I could ever have imagined, as I was the only “white girl” in the room. I have learned and relearned many a thing as I homeschooled not one year but 20 some and more. I talked about how my Daddy loved, when I didn’t know it was love, I talked at his funeral in front of a crowd. I’ve cooked and not cooked, and had days I nearly couldn’t go on. I’ve read book after book, painted my nails, planted a sunflower and corn just for kicks. But some reason one night while I was online, I read about a blogging conference and feared I had to go. Oh I knew I was older than most the women there, yet I wondered who would hold a hand or a heart for those, who like me would make a twist or a turn with mountains that seemed impassable and find themselves on an unfamiliar road and need someone, some real live someone, to tell them “press on“!

And my twists and my turns…well they’ve brought me to you….

PRESS ON!