A Possum in My Bed

March 10, 2014.Reading time 6 minutes.

I love my truck. When I bought it a decade ago, I didn’t know how much I would love it. The first week I had it, I bought one bale of pine straw every day just because I could. It was so much nicer than trying to shove four bales in the hatch of my old Pathfinder.

I’ve ceded the garage to my daughter and my poor truck has to stay outside in the woods. I often find a stray branch or pine cone that has fallen in the bed overnight, but nothing prepared me for my discovery this morning. This morning I found a possum in it – an angry possum.

I didn’t notice anything back there until I got halfway to work and heard something banging around. When I parked it at the office, I took a look and found him in there. He hissed at me, obviously blaming me for the predicament. I tried to reason with him. I told him I didn’t know he had come along. But he just hissed at me and stalked me around the perimeter of the truck bed with what can only be described as very angry gestures. Having no idea what to do, I considered dropping the tailgate and letting him go. But that didn’t seem wise as I would have been in the path of his escape. Also, I work near the interstate and didn’t want to just leave him there, away from home in a new dangerous place. What if possums are territorial and I drop him off in Braveheart Possum’s domain? He’d get his poor, furry butt kicked. What if it was a momma with babies at home and I separated them for life? I’m no zoologist and don’t know if how to tell the difference between a boy and a girl possum short of a close examination and that didn’t seem like a good plan.

So I decided he or she needed to go home. Surely a day in the bed of a truck wouldn’t hurt. We have an office cat, so later I stood out of harm’s way and threw some cat food back there as sustenance for the day. I don’t think he touched it but he didn’t throw any back. I took that as a good sign.

When the work day ended, he was there and we had a nice drive home. I had a stroke of genius on the trip and when we arrived, I retrieved a VERY LONG limb and placed it into the bed so that the end of it stuck out. He climbed it and was gone in a flash. Fortunately, he wanted nothing to do with me. He hissed once, for good measure, and scampered off.

I am reminded that sometimes I feel like I am in the bed of God’s truck. There have been many times where I can’t see over the sides and have no idea where God is taking me. But there are things I can trust about God that the poor possum couldn’t rely on with me.

1. God has a perfect plan, while my plan for the possum was dubious, at best.
2. He knows the exact direction I’m going and planned it long ago.
3. He loves me relentlessly, whereas I had only a slight bit of compassion for the possum.
4. I’m not in the truck bed by accident or because I slipped out of a tree, I am right where God wants me.

I worry when I’m in the back of God’s truck. Mostly, I want to know where we are going and how long the trip is going to last. Instead of trusting the driver, I hiss and try to make my own plans to get out.

Psalm 46:10 says:
Be still, and know that I am God

I find that very easy when I am behind the wheel. Lord, give the peace to be still when I’m in the bed of the truck.

*This post was written on March 10th, 2014, while I was pondering a career change. Thirty days after I published it, I began a true journey in the bed of God’s truck as Kylie was diagnosed with the cancer that would claim her life. I am still riding blind and may be for the rest of my life. But every once in a while he allows me a glimpse at the map of this wild ride and I sit back and hold on tight.

Photo credit: anddoesitexplode via photopin cc

Curse this Dreaded Black Thumb

March 9, 2014.Reading time 3 minutes.

Spring seems to have found us here in Georgia this weekend. While it is a simple fact that God smiles on The South sooner than the northern regions, I hold no illusions that spring is here for good. But yesterday found me in shorts cleaning up the yard. We live on a couple of wooded acres and green is beginning to peek through the gloomy brown – in my neighbor’s yard. I however was cursed with a dreaded black thumb. I follow some photography blogs displaying the most beautiful flowers from tropical locations, so I thought I would give you my best effort.

These are my gardenias. Are implies a current state of being, so I suppose I should say these were my gardenias. I don’t know what happened to them, they just shriveled up and turned brown like everything else I put in the ground. Our once vibrant hydrangeas look more like flaking twigs than actual plants. My grass – brown in every season unless you include moss and weeds. Every time I go to the orange store, I tell my friend Lou the dilemma and he recommends a plant that can’t be killed. I used to take them back with their return policy, but I’ve become embarrassed to do so anymore.

You know how God builds a perfect union from two dissimilar parts? One member of the marriage might be outgoing and the other shy, or one might be cognitive while the other is emotional. Then they join together like pieces of a puzzle and complete each other perfectly (sorry for the cheesy Jerry Maguire reference, but while I’m at it, enjoy…)

In a cruel twist of fate for botanists everywhere, my lovely bride has a matching black thumb. Potted plants seem to be a popular thank you gift here and she’s received a number of them over the years. All we have left is a bunch of pots filled with what I call soil of death. She kills indoor plants while I slay the jungle outside. Nothing is safe in our homestead. Thank you, God that we have a supermarket and don’t rely on subsistence farming. We’d all starve for sure.

So while my friends up north are mired in snow, we are seeing the sun in our little slice of heaven. Maybe it likes us because we don’t need it for photosynthesis. I don’t know, I just like wearing shorts again.