Hauling away the junk

Yesterday, I finally completed the task of bagging up all the yard waste from the terraces for the garbage company to haul away.


I worked for a couple of hours in the early August heat (it was 85º at 9 am yesterday) two days in a row to accumulate 17 bags of yard waste. Yesterday, after all that sweaty, hard work, and feeling pretty good about finally being able to feel like I've finished this phase of the project, I went inside to discover I had a migraine headache coming on.
Oh man! (By the way, this is very similar to what my vision becomes like when I get the beginning of a migraine, only my crescent goes the opposite direction. Just looking at this picture makes me a little nauseous!)

I haven't been getting migraines this last year. It's been wonderful! For the first year since I was about 14 years old, I could drink caffeine if I wanted (which I still didn't do- why bother picking up a vice that you don't have!), or have a glass of red wine every once in a while. I could work myself ragged, and not suffer the consequences the next day... I felt like Superwoman!

The difference has been my chiropractor. I started going last year in August, and only got a migraine once- while we were in Venice over the New Year (MIGHT have been exacerbated by a little too much Venetian wine).

But due to budget cutbacks, we had to stop going to our chiro for the summer (I had the whole family going. We were feeling GREAT!). I am hopeful that once I start working again, we'll be able to reinsert this into our regular schedules. All of us are noticing the difference.

But I digress...

As I was picking up the weeds yesterday, it struck me that these are all dead branches and grasses that have already been pulled, but unless they get removed, the landscape is still yucky-looking. Also, if they don't get removed, and they get rained on a few times, they start to rot and smell bad, and when you pick them up there's all kinds of gross things living underneath them!
It was a lot like therapy for me. I could see these things in my life that I was hanging onto, my past sins, my hurts, the ways people have hurt me, and the ways I've hurt myself and those around me- and I finally picked them up and put them at the foot of the cross. (Well, the front of my garage). There's probably a thousand ways that Jesus is better than the Garbage Man, but they are similar in this, they pick up my junk and haul it away, never to be seen again.

Some of my memories were prickly, and still had to be handled with care. Some were light and insubstantial, much lighter than they were when they had root in my life. Others were hard to break. They had big, thick stems like branches that took a lot of effort to shatter into pieces small enough for me to handle. Some made pleasant smells when I broke them, they were evergreen branches, and they smelled like Christmas. It was a reminder to remember the good with the bad.

For example...

My parents split up when I was about 12 years old. That's a traumatic age in anyone's life, and to add the instability of a broken home to the mix was horrible. For decades, I only remembered the bad about my childhood until a couple of years ago, I was challenged to remember the good. And you know what? It was there! There was a lot of good, as a matter of fact.
Even though it was a rough time, and I came out of it with a lot of scars, the best thing that came out of that time, was that I turned to Jesus and asked him into my life. I believe that he protected me from so many self-destructive behaviors that I could have done. Like the fabric that was laid down under the rocks of my landscape, the roots of the weeds that threatened to choke out the beauty in my life were not allowed to go very deep. The weeds may have shot up, but all it took was a gentle tug to rip those weeds out of the ground, roots and all.

I'm grateful that this project is over. Well, it'll never be OVER, but the hard part is done. Now I get to focus on planting new life. I'm looking at other people's lives (landscapes) and seeing what I like growing there. What do I want to invest in? What do I want to take the time to tend? I'm looking at my terraces and dreaming of a lovely garden instead of an eyesore that I just ignore because the amount of work it will take to control it is overwhelming. I go and visit the area daily to pull out any new weeds, cover it with prayer (Round Up), and dream of what I will plant there.