I recall as a boy of eight or ten digging a swimming pool.
Well, to be fair a small hole in the ground under a large oak tree. It’s
a bit nebulous now, but apparently a friend and I filled the depression
with water; as the result of trailing a couple of lengths of hose from
an outside spigot across a dirt road and up to that old tree. And having
filled the hole with water, we summarily plopped into the minute
morass.
They say that, “everything that glistens is not
necessarily gold.” Well, to be sure the theory was much more impressive
than the reality. I quickly learned that beyond the rather uncomfortable
state of affairs beneath my posterior, since I found myself sitting on a
myriad of tree roots, the water around me was a muddy brown, and was
quickly turning my skin and clothing the same complexion.
Needless to say, I didn’t linger in what amounted to a big mud puddle
any longer than it took to momentarily immerse my lower extremities in
it.
Fast forward half a decade.
I had contracted with a
Mr. Pickens to pull weeds out of his caladium patch each afternoon; at
the whopping hourly rate of $1.25 hour. Having jumped off my old school
bus #149, and eaten a quick sandwich, I must have retraced that pathway
to “hell’s little acre” for the course of a couple of years. It was hot,
back breaking work; bending my spine at a 90 degree angle; while
dragging a bushel basket behind me. Did I mention the dirt beneath my
feet represented the remains of the rich flora which existed before you
or I graced this planet? Muck. Dark, deep muck.
And as the sun
dipped low on the horizon, I turned my steps towards home, and a
well-deserved supper and an hour or so behind my parent’s B&W
television. Mama insisted that I come in the back porch door, and strip
down to my skivvies before entering the house. Since, as you might well
imagine, my face, and arms and hands, (and everything else) was black
with the rich loom of the nearby caladium fields.
In the past
half century, I have often driven past the fields of my adolescent
labor, and reminisced about a season to which I have little or no desire
to return. Those oddly-shaped, multi-colored plants are gone now, and
the weeds, against which I so courageously struggled, have finally won
the battle.
And more than once I have been tempted to return to
whatever remains of my all too theoretical swimming pool, if for no
other reason than to gaze up into the branches of that old oak tree, and
to retrace the outlines of a shallow depression into which I so naively
immersed myself.
Looking back, it occurs to me that whereas the
former diversion was a fleeting fancy of fun, the latter of the two was a
bit more ‘there there’ in nature; and to which I devoted
ligament-stretching, spine-wrenching work. The former, frivolity. The
latter fatigue. Each preoccupation leaving me some the worse for wear,
and covered up with abject filth.
And it seems to me that these youthful experiences represent more than reminisces, and offer us a spiritual application.
For I think the so-called ‘carnal Christian’ is always a bit too close
and too willing to immersing himself or herself in the mire of his own
making, or at least choosing. Too taken up with the excesses of this
life to be much heavenly good. Too enamored with frivolity, and too
estranged with fatigue.
But there is the wise man, he who is
taken up with the affairs of His Lord, and who bends his proverbial back
on a recurring basis. And in so doing ‘rubs shoulders’ with the vilest
of men, and cruelest of circumstances. And though oft be-smudged, yet
only momentarily, and only superficially, by the spiritual darkness
which surrounds him.
By William McDonald, PhD. Excerpt from "(Mc)Donald's Daily Diary" Vol. 40. Copyright pending
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