Basic Training

Monty and I got a new couch a few weeks ago.  And since the day it was delivered, this has been the conversation in our house:

Hey, Mackin, stop scratching the couch.
Mackin, seriously.  I’m not playing.
Please stop, Mackin. I’m begging you.
LOOK WHAT YOU’VE DONE! 
Mackin, stop it now or I WILL STOP YOU.
I thought I stopped you!  Why is this so hard for you to learn?!

In fairness to Mackin, it’s not completely his fault.  He’s our “special” cat—we love him dearly, but brains aren’t his long suit.  When he does something completely nonsensical like hiss at my polka dotted socks or suddenly, after weeks of wearing it, get scared of his own collar, I have to remind myself that he’s operating with less brain power than his brothers.  And I mean no offense to our sweet boy when I say that I hope and pray that I have more brains than he does.  Because I do see the parallels between us.  I’m a slow learner, too.  It took me decades to learn lessons I should have learned a long time ago—lessons so basic that, had I learned them back then, would have saved me a great deal of trouble.  In case you might need a refresher course or, like me, you need to learn them for the first time, I’ll share them with you:

Be nice.  Especially to yourself.  We say horrible things to ourselves—things we wouldn’t say to our worst enemy, if we had one.  If you found your child or niece or nephew crying and you asked them what was wrong, would you agree when they said, “I’m ugly.  I’m not as smart as everybody else.  I’ll never be good enough.  Everything is my fault.”?  Or would you put your arms around that hurting child and tell them why those statements aren’t true?  Do that for yourself.  Words have enormous power, and if you’re listening to that kind of negative dialogue in your head, day after day, you will start to believe it.

If it hurts, don’t do it.  I remember when, as little kids, one of us would twist our arm or ear or finger in some strange way, and then tell Mom, “It hurts when I do this!”  She’d say, “Then don’t do it.”  If something you’re doing is hurting you, stop doing it.  If a friendship or other relationship is causing you pain again and again, God might be telling you to finally let it go.  And if one of your own behaviors is hurting you, stop it.  Now.  While you still have a choice.

If you’re doing something you shouldn’t be doing, you will always get caught.  When my sisters and I were in high school, my mom used to tell us that she prayed that if we were doing something we shouldn’t be, we’d get caught.  I don’t know how that affected my sisters, but it put the fear of God into me.  And I discovered as I grew up that, as I said in my previous blog, if you’re doing something you think is secretive, it isn’t.  God sees you.  And, if you’re lucky, you’ll get caught.  I remember the feeling of being caught—I felt like an animal who had stepped into a trap.  Every move I made caused the trap to clamp down and tighten its grip, making the pain more and more unbearable until I finally cried out to God to set me free.

No one is coming to save you.  In the darkest years of my life, I had this fantasy that someone would come along, lift me out of my despair and addiction, and fix me.  Monty.  A kindly stranger.  Anyone.  And I wasted a lot of time passively waiting, holding out hope that someone was coming for me.  Had I bothered to take my eyes off of myself and my immediate circumstances, maybe I would have looked up sooner—to the only One who could save me from drowning in the mess I’d made.  He required me to work for it—and I still have to, every day.  But I’ve realized that a battle that requires so much from me isn’t something I’m willing to surrender easily.  It’s worth far too much to me.  And I know God planned it that way.

Don’t let yourself get bored.  When I’m bored, I start looking for ways to fill the hours.  Watching “The Bachelor” only fills up an hour or two—and my choices to fill up the rest of the time are never good ones.  I have to be especially vigilant about getting bored because if my mind isn’t occupied, I’ll fill it with unhealthy thoughts.  Charles Spurgeon once wrote, “A certain class of persons are greatly gifted with the mournful faculty of inventing troubles.  If the Lord has not sent them any trial, they make one for themselves.  They have a little trouble factory in their houses, and they sit down and use their imaginations to meditate terror.”  I am one of these “certain class of persons.”  And I’m trying to put that “little trouble factory” out of business.  But I can’t do it if I let myself get bored—I won’t just have a trouble factory.  I’ll have a whole home business that runs around the clock, manufacturing problems and issues out of thin air.

Life is short.  And though it’s a cliché to say, it really does go by so fast.  The sheer dailiness and routine of life can wear us down and make us so weary that we stop noticing that time is passing until we wake up and realize we’ve missed precious years.  I speak from experience here—I missed an entire decade of my life because of addiction.  I can’t ever get that time back.  None of us can, once it’s gone.  And the time we waste is often time spent worrying about things that very well might be the blessings we’ll wish for years from now.

I know that the day will come when Monty and I will give anything to have Mackin scratching the couch.  I look at Mackin in his bed right now, and I can’t even think about that day.  But in the meantime, Monty and I have to solve the couch problem.  So Monty ordered “couch protectors”—from the picture he showed me, they look sort of like really hideous shin guards.  I think they’ll be almost as ugly as if we just let Mackin tear the couch apart; Monty’s determined to give them a try.  I just have to make sure that when the box of couch protectors arrives, I don’t let the three boys play with the box at the same time. They’ll treat it like a fort and fight over it and inside of it until the fur really does fly.  So they have to play in it one at a time. That’s one lesson learned.  Finally.