griping

I’ve never used a riding mower before. I never had a lawn big enough to need one.

For most of my life, since I was nine or ten, I’ve pushed a mower to get the grass to a manageable length. Back and forth, step after plodding step. Leaning forward, hands spread across the push handle, row follows row until the task is completed.

It has always been a hot, tedious chore.

I have always been careful to say so too, after each session. The Lovely Lady usually has a cold drink ready for me when I’m done and she stands there smiling as I complain.

The yard I mow now is done with a riding mower. I sit down to do the job. No more do I take step after step while following the roaring lawn implement. I let the clutch out and the machine carries itself (and me) back and forth across the expanse of green, chewing up and spitting out all that exceeds the height I want to see when I’m finished.

What could be better? Like day and night, the two methods are. Or, are they?

Somehow, she still gets the same complaint from me at the end of the afternoon.

It’s a hot, tedious chore. And yes. I tell her so.

…and that seat just beats me up as it throws me from side to side over the uneven ground…

She smiles and hands me my cold water.

As I think about it, the red-headed lady who hands me my water is replaced—in my inner sight, that is—by another red-headed lady I loved—the red-headed lady who raised me.

She just looks up from her crocheting as she sits in her rocker and reminds me that I’ve always complained. Always.

You’d complain if they hung you with a new rope.

I didn’t ask. Sometimes, it’s just better to work things out on your own. Maybe it had something to do with that other thing she always said about ropes.

Give you enough rope and you’ll hang yourself.

Nope. No help there, either.

In time, though, I think I’ve worked out the new rope saying. Simply put, it means we complain about the most absurd things at the most inappropriate moments. It’s an absurd statement meant to point a spotlight at an absurd action.

The red-headed lady (the one who raised me) was right. I do complain about ridiculous things when, in fact, they are the very things for which I should be grateful.

Leftovers again? Again?

Why are they coming to visit tonight?

I just bought gasoline for this thing last week!

If I have leftovers, I have plenty to eat. More than plenty.

When they come to visit again, be it friends, or grandchildren, or even the in-laws, I have companionship—a wondrous gift ill-suited for disdain of any sort.

If I need to purchase gasoline again, I have had need of a vehicle and am blessed to have access to one—a luxury most in this world do not have.

I’m not preaching. I’m not.

Still, I am ashamed of myself, but I think I’m not alone.

It is some comfort to not be the only one. Really, I think if I didn’t complain, then I might be the only one. From the beginning, humans have complained.

The woman you gave me…the complaint Adam made, implying that if God had only had better sense than to burden him with Eve, everything could have continued as it was. (Genesis 3:12)

We’ve complained ever since.

The Children of Israel in the desert did it, again and again. Moses did, too.

Elijah hid in the mountains after an astounding victory and trotted out his accomplishments while complaining that He hadn’t been treated very well.

Jonah preached a better sermon than Billy Graham could ever hope for, with appropriate accompanying results, yet he complained that God allowed the repentant sinners to live.

It wasn’t only the men. Sarah suggested Abraham should take her servant as a surrogate mother, but then complained about the result of that relationship—so much so that her dutiful husband drove the child and his mother into the desert to die.

Martha complained that her sister was a slacker, leaving her to do all the important work.

I’m not the only one. But, here’s the thing.

I don’t want to be one at all.

Besides the infamous squeaky wheel, I see no lasting benefit to complaining.

It’s not what I want to be remembered for. And, that’s just what the Apostle, my namesake, reminded the good folk at Philippi of—that they were the focus of their generation’s scrutiny.

Everything—every single thing—you do should be done without complaining or grumbling. Live exemplary lives, with nothing to criticize. You are in full sight of the world, blazing like stars in the sky as you walk daily in the middle of sin-filled and perverse communities. (Philippians 2:14-15)

It’s not just complaining about the inconveniences of life he’s talking about, although given the nature of the creature, that seems likely enough.

Implied is the directive that we shouldn’t mutter against the folks around us, both followers of Christ and non-believers.

Selah.

Complaining is proof of an ungrateful heart. It is evidence of an unforgiving spirit.

In short, it shows a heart unchanged by grace and love.

Complaining shows a heart unchanged by grace and love. Click To Tweet

My heart. Ungrateful. Unforgiving.

Unbowed.

I would not have it so.

I want to shine. Like a star on the horizon, I want to blaze clearly and distinctly.

I think I’ll start by thanking the Lovely Lady for the cold water. Perhaps the ride on the mower wasn’t as rough as all that, either.

All good gifts come from above.

It’s hard to complain when I’m saying thank you.

I personally believe we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain.
(Jane Wagner ~ American writer/director)

Let everyone see that you are considerate in all you do. Remember, the Lord is coming soon.
Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank him for all he has done.
(Philippians 4:5,6 ~ NLT ~ Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. All rights reserved.)

This is not what I was made to do.

I have said the words more times in the last weeks than ever before. One might almost think I’m unhappy.

One would be right. Some of the time.

I’m a communicator. A people person. I use words. It’s how I survived in the retail market for nearly forty years.

That was then.

Today, I hung a kitchen cabinet door. Three times. The same one—three times.

I’m not good with cabinet doors. Or sheetrock. Or wall trim.

The red-headed woman who raised me had an apt simile for such a situation. She usually did.

He’s like a fish out of water.

It’s nothing to joke about. A fish out of water is terminal. It will die.

I don’t think I will die from my attempts at home remodeling. If you could be a spider in the corner though, you’d think someone was dying.

My griping and grousing are vocal and vehement. I call myself names. I call the materials I’m working with names.

I even bring God into the conversation, accusing Him and questioning His wisdom in trusting me with this task.

It does feel as if I’m drowning and can’t get enough air. With sweat running down my back and face, I do the task once, twice, and a third time—all with the same result.

Do you ever feel as if you're drowning and can't get enough air? Click To Tweet

Drowning. In frustration—and impatience. But, mostly in self-pity.

And yet. . .

And yet, I am not a man drowning in water deep, nor a fish tossed up on the river bank to flop until, gasping for the water rushing through my gills from which to draw the filtered oxygen my body demands, I finally lie still forever.

I am not drowning. I am in an uncomfortable situation—one in which I’ve never found myself before.

But, it’s not the first time.

And, I’m not the only one.

The King of Creation sometimes lets us know we’ve become too comfortable, too complacent.

It’s a good thing.

I keep telling myself that. It’s a good thing.

I wish I could have remembered it earlier today.

I wonder if Joseph, he of the many-hued robe, was any better, day-to-day, in remembering that God only wanted good for him.

I imagine he wasn’t—day after tedious day.

I want him not to have been any better. It would make me feel less guilty, anyway.

I want Joseph to have muttered under his breath when he was forced to be a house slave in Egypt. I want him to have defended himself, at least in a whisper, when accused of acts he would never have committed. I want him to have screamed at God as he sat, forgotten and betrayed in that horrible dungeon.

It would be easier to look at my own face in the mirror if those things were true. At least, it seems so to me tonight.

But then, griping and muttering past, I want, like Joseph, to understand God had a plan all along.

I also want—in the end—to have made the right choices, even when it felt as if those very decisions were what was making life an unfamiliar maze, one in which there was so little air that it felt suffocation was seconds away.

And, gasping for air, I finally want to trust a God I cannot see with the things I hold in my hands and the future I can just make out in the distance ahead.

I will go back tomorrow and take that cabinet door back down, only to put it back up again.

I will hear, over the dissenting voices in my head, the quiet tones of my father, quoting those familiar words from the heart of Jeremiah, the crying man.

I know the plans I’ve made for you, says your Creator. They are for great good—for your benefit and not for your harm. There is hope. There is a future to which you should look with anticipation. (Jeremiah 29:11)

And, whether Joseph did or not, I will probably yell some more. I may even shout at God in my frustration and anger.

He can take it.

He knows (and remembers clearly) how we were formed. He knows that we came from dirt. (Psalm 103:14)

And still, He seeks to shape us into something better, something more refined.

And still, He seeks to shape us into something better. Click To Tweet

While we gasp for breath in a new environment, He is breathing new life into us.

It’s time to do the new thing He has put in front of me.

Perhaps, there is more for me to do.

Breathe deep.

Keep moving.

The future lies just ahead.

They did what soldiers always did. They improvised.
(Geoffrey Norman ~ American writer/editor)

Alive without breath;
as cold as death;
never thirsting, ever drinking;
clad in mail, never clinking.
Drowns on dry land,
thinks an island
is a mountain;
thinks a fountain
is a puff of air.
(from The Hobbit ~ J.R.R. Tolkien ~ Ballantine Books, New York. Copyright 1937, 1938, 1966.)

He's Taken Leave

Random wanderings with Paul Phillips

The Lawnmower You Gave Me

Drowning Fish