7/20: GIVE AND TAKE
This weekend we had our annual summer picnic, and it turned out to be an awesome day. God gave us pretty much the perfect 4 hour window with almost no smoke from the wild fires, and just enough of a breeze to keep the normal boaters off the lake, but not so much that we couldn’t enjoy some tubing ourselves in a very wide-open expanse. After the party ended, my wife joined me on the boat for another few hours, and it was almost the perfect day…… until I tore up my prop on a sandbar because I forgot to check the depth of the prop before leaving the sandbar.
I have had things like that happen all my life. You think you have the perfect day, but then there is ONE little wrinkle that kind of brings you back down to reality. If ONLY that one thing didn’t happen, how great would that particular experience have been? I read a story years ago that really put things like that in perspective. I forget the details, but the gist of it was that sometimes you have to give a little get a little. It’s almost like there is a small price you have to pay for good things that come your way. When we go to an amusement park, for instance, we have to give something, our money, for the entertainment that we are about to enjoy.
I truly believe that God works that way. There is give and take in most every experience. If before the picnic I was told that the price of having a great event, with essentially no smoke and little boat traffic on the lake, was going to be a damaged prop, or there was going to be no picnic at all due to bad weather, I would have gladly taken the damaged prop. The old me would have whined about the situation and let it take away from the rest of the great event. The current (and hopefully permanent) me, is certainly bummed about the damage, but just look at it as the standard tradeoff for the benefits we received to even be able to have the picnic.
I don’t consciously think about and expect something like that to happen when events are going extremely well. I think that would certainly be a negative way to go through life. But when those things do happen now, I tend to roll with them better when they do. A few years ago during a hike out west, the soles of my boots were literally crumbling off as I walked. I was picking up pieces of rubber as they fell off to not leave any trash behind. By the end of the hike, I parted ways with my trusted footwear that lasted me 10-15 years. The experience I took from that hike was totally worth the price of having to invest in new hiking boots.
As events happen in your own life, don’t expect perfection. Very rarely is that the case. When the yang creeps into your yin, just know that that is the way life has, and probably always will work. If we always take, but never give, we certainly would become selfish. Sometimes I think the giving is just done for us (damaging a prop, trashing some boots) to keep us grounded and remind us that the world needs us to give more than what we take from it if we are going to move it in a positive direction.
