I just love nights where I can sit outside on my balcony and have some quiet time to read or journal or think. Tonight was a good night to do just that....yes it was warm and muggy, but it was also quiet and peaceful. I was overjoyed to slow down for the first time today and crack open my bible for a few minutes. That's when it happened.
There I was reading a verse from Revelation for an online bible study I'm doing, when I was jolted out of my peaceful time. There it was, right by my bare foot. A beetle. You know the ones I'm talking about, those oval shaped black ones that stick to walls and fly and strike terror into the hearts of all living creatures. Here I am reading about the end of days, when suddenly I'm faced with a creature who is sure to be the end of MY days.
I didn't want that monster sticking in my long, beautiful, silky, wavy, majestic hair. I also didn't want it touching my foot and potentially making its way up my leg and towards my mediocre face. If there were ever a time for me to exclaim "I'm too pretty for this!" it was in that moment. I knew I had to do something. I couldn't just sit idly by while this bug plotted my demise. I had to devise a plan.
Girl vs. Bug
I slowly took my foot off of the rail of my balcony and tiptoed towards the door, keeping my eye on my foe the entire way there should he decide to follow me and shank me with his little beetle-y legs. I quickly ran inside and slammed the door shut and tried to think of some humane ways to get rid of this thing. Unfortunately I was going to have to kill it. I had no choice. My neighbor lets her dog poop on her balcony and doesn't clean it up, it's a beetle's dream. I grab a steak knife which is the closest thing to me at the time and head back outside. I would like you to envision the battle that followed. I went after it, the jerk beetle came at me like a spider monkey....but with wings....and smaller....and scarier. I was waving a knife in the air like a homicidal maniac and my neighbors were looking at me funny trying to figure out what was going on. You don't just bring out a knife in the hood for no reason. I managed to scream out the word "beetle" which brought laughter. This was not funny. My life was on the line. Eventually I chopped that beetle in half and left him on the railing as a warning to his little buggy friends.
I realize now how ridiculous this story sounds, but isn't it funny that we react like this to circumstances too? Think about it.
We can let the tiniest of events control how we react and what we do. A tiny beetle dictated how I spent my night. Something so tiny and insignificant made me uncomfortable and scared me enough to abandon what I was doing that made me happy. How many events in my life have I let dictate how I live? A lot. Think about how much time we have on this earth. Every trial we have, every obstacle we face....they seem like a big deal when we think about them. But in the grand scheme of things, they are just little blips. We attack those circumstances, fears, and trials with metaphorical knives the way I attacked that bitty insignificant bug with a real one. When you stop and think about the big picture, what's the point?
That beetle wasn't doing anything. He was straight up chillin' like all good bugs do. Our obstacles come and go and we sometimes do whatever we can to hang onto them and beat them to death. We shouldn't let them have that much of a grip on us. We become so consumed by what could happen, that we don't recognize what is happening. When we obsess about the what ifs, and the maybes, we lose sight of the good things we have. We miss out on a lot.
It seems so silly to me that I could have this huge 'a-ha' moment because of a bug and my fear of it. But truly, think about it. Think about how many times you've let simple things keep you from pursuing something. I challenge you to face those fears of the little things and next time you focus on the what ifs, turn away and focus on the here and now.
