Weeds

When I woke up this morning, I had a tough problem running through my head. It’s days later and I still don’t have the solution, so why is that?

But let me back up a minute. At the beach house where we live, we don’t have a yard, but we do have several planter areas with banana palms and lots of decorative flowers. I like having these planters because the flowers are beautiful when they bloom, and they add contrasting color to the otherwise solid stretch of white sand outside our window.  Living near white sand, blue water, and colorful flowers is a blessing, but I’ll tell you what’s not a blessing… Weeds!

The whole time I was pulling out those ornery, ugly weeds this weekend, I was wishing I was done. I hate to admit it, but I wanted to get back inside and follow the golf tournament on TV, a much more satisfying endeavor, so I was rushing my work. And then a thought occurred to me. “If I don’t take my time and reach down to the very bottom of each weed, and do my best to pull out the root along with the plant, it will just grow back that much faster.” I definitely don’t want that to happen, which reminded me of when I owned a contracting business. I would constantly coach my electricians to do a great job. When I sent them out on service calls, I would tell them, “Don’t just fix the problem, fix the problem for the last time!” In other words, look for ways to the solve the problem that causes the problem… so that it won’t happen again.

That was an excellent philosophy and I believe it can be applied to a lot of things in life. If you have a job you don’t enjoy, don’t keep hoping it’s going to change, change your job. If you have friends who are not such good people, you probably can’t change them, so try getting new friends. If you have a bad habit of smoking cigars whenever you go golfing (not talking about me of course) then don’t buy cigars to take with you, dummy. Duh!

Sounds easy, right? Well it can be for a lot of things, but unfortunately, not everything. I think God made it that way on purpose because if everything was easy and/or fixable, we human beings wouldn’t grow and become stronger and ultimately be able to create a better life for ourselves. So, going back to that problem I mentioned at the top of the page, the problem that has been worrying me for days, the problem I can’t seem to solve. Well, I still can’t solve it and maybe I never will. But guess what, I’m okay with that because I realize… not everything is fixable!

The only thing that should be considered the 

end of the world, is the end of the world.

~ Former President Barack Obama