Do you ever find yourself in such a situation that, for just a moment, as the chaos erupts and explodes around you… you have to take a minute to just think about how crazy it is?
I think life is filled with situations like this. Sometimes they become the greatest moments… or the worst. It all depends on how you react to it.
Within the past six months of writing this, I did something pretty crazy. I hauled my butt all the way from Nevada to Ohio to attend The Company (a ministry/trade school for writers on fire for God). Out here, I’ve been involved in some… less than ideal, sort of semi-crazy, chaotic situations.
Let me share one with you now.
My mentor, let’s call him Brad (cause that’s his name), isn’t just a teacher at the school. He’s also a father, and a ‘hobby-farmer’. When I first moved up here, he was the proud owner of a small herd of pigs. I say small, because there were only like 5 of them, but please don’t misread me. These pigs were, at the smallest weight, 250lbs.
One late September/early October day, we’re doing our schoolwork and having a completely normal day, when we get a group text from Brad telling us that, today, they were herding the pigs into a trailer to take them to the slaughterhouse, and we were welcome to come.
This meant we’d get an hour or so off of school, and I thought pigs were cute (I know, my mistake), so we all clambered into my classmate Lindsey’s truck and took off for his house. Little did I know that this day would change how I viewed farm animals forever.
We pulled up to his house, stepped outside, and stood awkwardly around the fence as they set up the trailer. I’m a city girl. I was so out of my element, I didn’t even know what questions to ask, to then ask if I could help.
I watched quietly, wearing oversized flannel and a pair of cute boots, as they herded the pigs all the way up to the trailer… and then total chaos broke out.
I discovered that day why the villains in Animal Farm are the pigs. Stubborn and angry, these five pigs wanted one thing and one thing only: To stay exactly where they were. What should have been a quick and fun load up quickly turned into a two-and-a-half-hour adventure as the pigs aggressively refused to so much as step beside the trailer, let alone climb into it.
In the end, we ended up having to hog-tie each individual pig, wrap the rope around the bars in the trailer, and then, with five to six people on the rope, pull the pig into the trailer. Sometimes the rope would slip loose, and the pig would escape, sending all of us back onto our butts in the mud.
It was hard work. It smelled, the sun was hot, and the pigs scream seemed so loud that I could almost picture it latching onto each individual molecule of air around us.
Not really what I pictured when I decided to attend ‘writing school’…
We all have a ‘pig’ situation in our life. Those days where we think something is going to turn out one way and it ends up total and complete chaos.
I could go on and on about how horrible of a day it was, how we didn’t get any school done, or write the day off as a total disaster… or pig-aster.
Or maybe I could go on and on about how the fed-ex lady stopped her deliveries just to help us out. How proud we felt once we got the pigs in the trailer. The victory fries Lindsey, Thirzah, and I rewarded ourselves with in the aftermath. The great story we got in the process (I mean, I have a whole blog post on it now). Or how funny it was to fly back, land on my butt, and catch my mentor in the corner of my eye, biting his lips to keep from laughing.
The point is this… No matter your experience, there is joy to be found in every circumstance…
So how are you finding joy in yours?
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Photo credit: Melissa P.