Duck!

As often as I can, I like to ride my bicycle to the office in the mornings.  It’s really quite astounding as to how many treasures you find along the road.  If I chose to stop for every aluminum can, I’d bet that I’d have saved up $2 or more!!! Wow, right? I usually pass on the aluminum cans, but I’ve been known to stop and pick up, coins…lot’s of coins, paper money in the increments of $1, $5, $10 & $20!  I have stopped to pick up copper tubing, brass fittings, copper wire, scrap aluminum and lead wheel weights.  I take these treasures and recycle them for money!  People have called me cheap…can you believe it?  Cheap would be piling all of this stuff in my garage until I find time to strip the insulation off of every wire…I would prefer you not look inside my garage at this time…

This past week, while riding to the office, I was treated with a very unexpected treasure.  I was heading north on county road 76 when I encountered a raft of ducks…all mallards.  I came incredibly close to them before they took flight.  I was so close, in fact, that it felt that I could have easily have swatted one with my hand. (Why don’t you ever see that while hunting?)  As the flock took flight, directly over me, I was greeted with a nice blob of brown green excrement landing on my bare right leg…ummm….ewwww.  My first instinct was to wipe it off…but, then it would be all over my gloves….soooo….I kept on pedaling.  This little duck treasure mixed with my sweat and began sliding down my leg. Unsure how to best handle this, I pedaled faster, trying to get to the office to wash it off before this nastiness made it all the way down to my socks.

Fortunately, I made it, and was able to hobble into the bathroom to wash and scrub, and scrub some more, until I felt that my leg had been thoroughly cleaned.

It’s interesting to me…how appalled we can be with the nasty, yucky, icky things that we encounter physically…and truth be told, they are nasty, yucky and icky.  Yet, if we were to be honest with ourselves, some of the biggest yuck hasn’t been duck poo on my leg…rather, it’s something on the inside.

There is an amazing and beautiful passionate prayer from the Apostle Paul, in Ephesians 3:14-21.  He prays that the Holy Spirit will do a work…a life changing work…on the inside.  Paul prays that the power of the Holy Spirit will change us. Before our outside can really be different...something must happen on the inside...something that we cannot do...but the Holy Spirit can.