Life As Rocket Science: Part 9, Burying Your Dead Possums

October 4, 2012 | 1 Comment

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by:  Staci Stallings

It’s amazing to work with real people who have real problems.  It’s fascinating to watch God at work on their hearts and how they are learning lessons they don’t even know they are learning.  I love being just objective enough to “see” what they are missing and help them see it too.

My friend, the one of the horse-training thoughts (see the Oct. 1 post) was the inspiration for this one as well.  You see, there are some thought patterns in her life that are so persistently negative that they have practically taken over her life.  She has learned through our conversations that those thought patterns have to go if she is to find and live in joy and peace.  The problem is, WHAT do you do with them?

She wrote one day to say that once again that same old, tired, depressing thought pattern had cropped up again, and it was getting old that it just wouldn’t go away.  That reminded me of a true story from my recent life… the story of our dog Scout and the dead possums.

Now Scout is only a year old, very active, medium-sized, outdoor dog.  She is also our only dog, so unless she plays with the cats, she’s on her own most of the day.  So she runs and plays with our swings in the morning and can be seen running the perimeter of our large backyard.  She can’t get out of the backyard, but she has the run of that area.

One day my kids went out there to play and came running back in the house in horror.  Scout had KILLED two possums!  And she wanted to “give them” to my children!

Needless to say this was worse than that knitted sweater with three sleeves that Grandma wants to give you at Christmas.

They did not WANT this “gift.”

But oh, was Scout proud of those dead possums.  She would play with them and drag them around, and paw at them and drag them around.Gifts Ad

Finally we buried them, and what did she do?  Dug them up of course!

She played with them so long, they were in pieces.  So we gathered the pieces and buried them in the FRONT yard where she couldn’t get to them anymore!

I told my friend this story and then said, “That’s what you’re doing with these negative thoughts.  You’ve got all these dead possums–depressingly bad thoughts–strewn about your “yard,” and you take them and play with them and pull them apart and put them together and think about them and mull them over.

That is NOT helping!  You’ve got to BURY them, by giving them to God… and then leave them buried!

How many dead possums do you have in your “backyard”?  How many tired old times have you let your thoughts tell you the same old depressing things?

Well, stop it.

Bury that thought.  Give it to God, and move on!

Seriously.  It’s time.

 

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Comments

  1. Suzanne D. Williams says: October 4, 2012

    Thanks for this, Staci. I needed to hear it.

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