You know when your favorite store gets a facelift? Well...that is what happened to my blog. I hope you enjoy the grand re-opening of Mo Doing it Live.
So the other night I slept on the back porch. I battled over the appropriateness of the activity and my age. I just wasn’t sure if I was too old or not. After addressing my dilemma to the masses (i.e. tweeting about it) and receiving no protests to the contrary (in fact, I got 5 likes), I decided to go forth with my excursion to the great unknown (i.e. the back porch).
There is something incredibly relaxing about lying outside with the crickets chirping, the wind faintly rustling the leaves, and lightning bugs dancing through the night. The porch is screened in so I was sheltered from the elements, creepy visitors, and, as all 21st century adventurers should have, access to an outlet and wifi. I made delicious banana and nutella s’mores and watched, what was supposed to be a suspenseful movie, but ended up just being a bunch of manipulative drama.
Then I fell asleep reading a John Green book. If you haven’t read any of this man’s work yet, then you should! I’m not just talking about The Fault in Our Stars (which has B-E-A-U-T-I-F-U-L diction), but ALL of his works. They are simply amazing. Anyways,just about everything was perfect except for the bullfrog in the stream that, apparently, had a twig in its throat. This thing WOULDN’T shut up and sounded like it was going to die at any moment. Poor guy (I was, slightly sympathetic of his plight).
After several hours of glorious sleep upon a hardwood floor, God turned the day on. I’m not kidding. It was like the crickets clocked out and the birds clocked in. Somewhere between stage 1 and 2 of my REM cycle the crickets just stopped chirping and every bird within a ½ mile radius began their morning vocal training. The sun came out of nowhere. “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light” (Genesis 1:3). Eventually, I got up and went to my heavily curtained room, as all 20-something campers should do.
It turns out that that unfortunate bullfrog was, in fact, not a bullfrog, but a rather large turtle. Along a 15 foot path there was one single row of bricks across it. She moved them out of the way and began digging a hole to lay her eggs. That noise I heard was her shell scraping across the bricks. I want to know how she chose that one particular spot to lay her eggs. It wasn´t the closest or the farthest point of the path from the nearby stream, nor was it the sandiest, shadiest or sunniest. The only thing that made it different were the bricks that my grandfather had laid across it to see how many bricks he needed. She laid her eggs that morning. Buried them and then walked away. There it is, the miracle of life.
So much of the time we look for miracles in all of the wrong places. We expect God to show just how omnipotent he is through some grandiose, complicated miracle when we should also see the magnificence of the universe in the small miracles. While this story includes the miracle of life, it also includes the miracle of serenity. The miracle of simply being. Of seeing something seemingly ordinary through a new perspective. The love song of crickets has a different meaning for an 8-year-old than a 22-year-old. There are many simple endeavors that we overlook as adults. We push them into the "childish" category. But that is where you find God's power. THOSE are life's simple miracles.
So the other night I slept on the back porch. I battled over the appropriateness of the activity and my age. I just wasn’t sure if I was too old or not. After addressing my dilemma to the masses (i.e. tweeting about it) and receiving no protests to the contrary (in fact, I got 5 likes), I decided to go forth with my excursion to the great unknown (i.e. the back porch).
There is something incredibly relaxing about lying outside with the crickets chirping, the wind faintly rustling the leaves, and lightning bugs dancing through the night. The porch is screened in so I was sheltered from the elements, creepy visitors, and, as all 21st century adventurers should have, access to an outlet and wifi. I made delicious banana and nutella s’mores and watched, what was supposed to be a suspenseful movie, but ended up just being a bunch of manipulative drama.
Then I fell asleep reading a John Green book. If you haven’t read any of this man’s work yet, then you should! I’m not just talking about The Fault in Our Stars (which has B-E-A-U-T-I-F-U-L diction), but ALL of his works. They are simply amazing. Anyways,just about everything was perfect except for the bullfrog in the stream that, apparently, had a twig in its throat. This thing WOULDN’T shut up and sounded like it was going to die at any moment. Poor guy (I was, slightly sympathetic of his plight).
After several hours of glorious sleep upon a hardwood floor, God turned the day on. I’m not kidding. It was like the crickets clocked out and the birds clocked in. Somewhere between stage 1 and 2 of my REM cycle the crickets just stopped chirping and every bird within a ½ mile radius began their morning vocal training. The sun came out of nowhere. “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light” (Genesis 1:3). Eventually, I got up and went to my heavily curtained room, as all 20-something campers should do.
It turns out that that unfortunate bullfrog was, in fact, not a bullfrog, but a rather large turtle. Along a 15 foot path there was one single row of bricks across it. She moved them out of the way and began digging a hole to lay her eggs. That noise I heard was her shell scraping across the bricks. I want to know how she chose that one particular spot to lay her eggs. It wasn´t the closest or the farthest point of the path from the nearby stream, nor was it the sandiest, shadiest or sunniest. The only thing that made it different were the bricks that my grandfather had laid across it to see how many bricks he needed. She laid her eggs that morning. Buried them and then walked away. There it is, the miracle of life.
So much of the time we look for miracles in all of the wrong places. We expect God to show just how omnipotent he is through some grandiose, complicated miracle when we should also see the magnificence of the universe in the small miracles. While this story includes the miracle of life, it also includes the miracle of serenity. The miracle of simply being. Of seeing something seemingly ordinary through a new perspective. The love song of crickets has a different meaning for an 8-year-old than a 22-year-old. There are many simple endeavors that we overlook as adults. We push them into the "childish" category. But that is where you find God's power. THOSE are life's simple miracles.
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