"I used to pray for times like this..."

On perspective in the face of challenges and opportunities.

I tell you, last week was one to remember and one to forget. On Friday, Erica comes home after work and stopped me from getting in the shower (needed to freshen up after the gym and before date night) and told me that I needed to go outside immediately with a sense of nervous urgency in her voice. What she struggled to express was that as she drove into our garage she noticed something moving alongside the front of our home between the bricks. When I went outside to see what it was, I noticed above our outdoor porch seating, the largest snake that I had ever interacted with in person. To understand the gravity of the situation, you must know that Erica and I are the furthest thing from being “snake people”; honestly we are not “wildlife of any kind” people. Full panic ensued. Prayers were spoken, phone calls to animal control were made, and my pacing around the front of the house to get different angles of this snake never stopped. After being told by two different animal control services that they either did not handle snakes OR did not have anyone available in our area because it was “busy season”, I knew that I had to handle things on my own. Long story short, with the help of a little ingenuity, a pressure washer, a rake, and a shovel, I was able to get control of the situation while also sending a message to the rest of the Gwinnett County snake community.

Interestingly enough, when I spoke with my good friend who also lives very close to us, he calmly responded “Oh yeah, in this area, you get snakes like that pretty regularly”. For a moment, I was reminded how we never saw snakes like that at our old townhome.

The day before the snake incident, I needed Home Depot to come to our home to help me install a kitchen appliance I recently replaced but was having trouble setting up on my own. This came after 10 days of back and forth regarding scheduling and scope of work, confusing and seemingly unnecessary charges, and lack of communication from the 3rd party installer Home Depot contracts for the type of work we needed. I had to take half a day off from work that I was not expecting to take to get things taken care of, and this included me going to Home Depot shortly after 8am to demand satisfaction and some form of resolution as we had not made progress in getting anything confirmed in days. Finally, after days of minimal assistance, we were able to get the installer to our home who handled our issue with 5 minutes’ worth of work (just as I anticipated and attempted to explain to Home Depot from the very beginning).

After Erica and I were married, we rented that first townhome and I could not help but think that issues like the one mentioned above would have been our landlord’s issue back then.

Now, as I think about both of those incidents from last week, I cannot help but consider them with a sense of gratitude. How crazy is it that we had a large snake on a piece of property that we own? I now get to be burdened with the responsibility of laying down snake repellant around the border of our house. The garden snake was likely attracted to our home in part by the garden that we had just revitalized and refreshed in front of our porch a few weeks prior. We never had the space to do that in our townhome before.

How blessed are we that we are responsible for purchasing new appliances that need to replace dated ones in our new (to us) home? We realize that it is a blessing to not have a landlord to call because you are the owner of your home. It was a journey for us to get to this point of home ownership a few years ago, and now that we are here we value the new problems we get to face together.

So often we face our current challenges without the perspective of hindsight. It is almost the same as only reading the last chapter of a classic novel as opposed to starting from the beginning. For those who read the Bible, if you read Revelation without the benefit of Genesis and the Gospels, you will miss the context that makes Revelation hope-filled instead of scary and cryptic. If you only watch the first 45 minutes of Avengers’ Endgame and consider none of the material before or after it, you could only assume that Thanos was right and mercilessly beheaded by Thor. In the face of current challenges, our perspective is shaped by the story we tell ourselves, and we have a responsibility to tell ourselves the full story.

Because your organization has grown, you now face new and more complex personnel and organizational structure issues - but imagine the challenges you would be facing had your organization never grown. Because you are older, your hair has grown gray and your body must be cared for more attentively and tenderly - but consider the sadness of a life cut short. Because you have relationships, you must now navigate the offenses and sensitivities of people being people - but what if you only knew what it was to be perpetually alone.

Life will never be without challenges and opportunities, yet most of us have the gift of choosing many of the challenges and opportunities we now get to face. In fact, even in some of the most distressing and frustrating seasons, most of us have prayed for times like this. With your new job or promotion, new challenges. With new friendships and relationships, new interpersonal conflicts. With new opportunities, new risks. These are blessings.

“Past You” would not have it any other way. “Future You” might just look at these as the good old days. “Present You” must find a way to find joy in it while it is still “today”.

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