Yesterday, I decided to spend a couple hours doing some yard work in our north Texas, suburbia home. Second to writing, gardening is extremely therapeutic for me. It was a beautiful, overcast morning with a just enough breeze to tickle my senses and keep my brow from abundantly sweating. I love those kinds of days. After completing the mowing, edging, and blowing, I took a few minutes to water the rose bushes and tomato plants nestled against the back porch as a sense of accomplishment, and order swept over me. With hose in hand, I looked down at my grass covered shoes, took two steps into the yard to rinse them off before calling it done, when out from behind a landscape stone near the recently watered rose bush, I spotted the head of a large snake. I stopped dead in my tracks, frozen in fear, and waited as the five foot reptile slithered three feet away from me. Once out of striking distance, I took three giant leaps backward and began screaming for my husband. I never knew I had the capability to produce such a loud shrill. Unbeknownst to him of my situation, my cries for help went unanswered as he was on a conference call in his office.
When the snake reached a safe distance on the opposite end of the porch, I leaped over the rose bush, cracked open the back door as to not let Dutch, our chocolate lab, outside and made my cries for help undeniably evident. “Claaaayton! CLAYTON! There’s a five foot sna
ke on out here!” He rose to his feet and quickly proceeded to the back porch. Not wanting to take my eyes off the snake for fear of his escape, Clayton (with his blue-tooth headset in place and conference call still going in his left ear) retrieved a long handled, flat head shovel and began his plight to save his damsel in distress. He shifted a rock to block the snake’s escape and began jabbing, as the snake’s head peeked out the other end. With five or six forceful thrusts amid the hissing snake in self-defense, Clayton was finally able to sever the head, and the battle was won. My HERO! Even though the war was over and the snake was dead, it took me over an hour to stop trembling with fear from what had just taken place.
While all this may give many of you the “heebie jeebies,” what I find interesting was realizing that for the remainder of the day, I was peering with a sense of great hesitation every time I went outside. Even though the danger had passed, fear, trepidation, and the message,“proceed with caution”, was the common thread racing through my head. I knew I had to take time to dive in and see what it was all about, as it was no longer about the snake. No, this was much deeper in its root than that of a slain reptile.
I just realized, and when I say “just” I mean just now, that I am living my life with the mindset of proceed with caution. I hate that about myself. When I was in my 20’s, I jumped into life with no regard to possible consequence or outcome. Some might call that free-spirited; some might refer to it as irresponsible. Truth be told, it was probably a little bit of both. So what happened? Where did that sense of reckless abandonment go? Even this morning as I sit here on the back porch tapping away at my laptop keys, my feet are perched atop a short stool and my eyes occasionally glance toward the landscape stones as if he’s going to rise from the dead and continue his reign of terror. The danger has passed Michelle, let’s move on.
I don’t want to live a life based on fear of what happened in the past. To that, I also don’t want to relive the twenty-something life of reckless abandonment. No, I want to live a life of intentional abandonment, or as some may call it, faith. But what is it that prevents me from doing so? Why am I holding on to the past as if it were still a 
present day danger? Why do I allow those in my now to pay the price for those of my yesteryear? Why wasn’t it enough to witness the death of the snake and see its lifeless body to relinquish the fear that the danger has truly passed? Literally and metaphorically speaking, why do I still fear the snake?
My “snake” is pain. I fear pain. Not physical pain, but emotional pain. I fear being hurt. Not just a little, but a lot. I fear it to the point that it prevents me from living a life of intentional abandonment and faith. I am living my today based on events of my yesterday. That’s not living – that’s reliving.
What’s your “snake?”
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