Don't Do Anything

I’ve begun the chapter of my story where I travel on my own. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while, but finally got the courage to start doing. The rewards from it are more than I can write here. I thought about writing just a blog on why, but frankly some of the why’s are just things I want to keep between myself and my soul. I love sharing my life with y’all, but sometimes the most precious things stay close to my heart. It’s called balance.

My favorite movie “Eat Pray Love” has a quote in it that I repeat to myself a lot, “Balance, darling, is not letting anyone love you more than you love yourself.” And so, some things are reserved so that I can love myself more than the affirmations of the writing about it or posting pictures of it. And in a world of over-saturation of “look what I did/am doing!!!” there are precious moments I will just carry with me myself and I.

If you were to ask one of my best friends in Nashville, Kylen, one of the weirdest things about me, she would have a lot to choose from, but she would probably say that I have to know where the bathroom is in a restaurant when I go. I have to know before I go. I do this because I don’t want to wander around the restaurant looking for it and end up walking in the kitchen or something. I want to blend in and not make a scene.

So traveling alone is a leap for me. Walking into restaurants I don’t know anything about, much less where the bathroom is, sitting at a table alone, is a HUGE step. Y’all wanna know something? When I walk in to these places alone, people look at me (!) for a little while, and then they don’t. And I sit at my big old table by myself with all the food a woman could want and am as happy as can be.

These are the baby steps I’m taking to be fearless. I want to be fearless.

This weekend I went on a wonderful journey to the Delta in Mississippi. Being a native Mississippian I have done a terrible job of exploring the beauty and history of our state. It’s so easy just to sit in our little towns and not explore, but I encourage exploring.

The Delta is an interesting part of the world. To the naked eye it might even seem undesirable, but y’all … the people and the history are so worth it! I think it’s beautiful. The people are some of the loveliest people I’ve met in a long time. The locals want to know about you. They want to sincerely thank you for visiting. The visitors want to talk about all of it. They want to soak it all in in a way I think we have forgotten how to do. 

Over the course of the entire weekend I didn’t encounter one person that wasn’t just wonderfully kind. We are so overwhelmed with the idea that everyone is bad these days. That isn’t true. We live in a world of wonderful people. Kind, warm, compassionate people.

I stayed at The Shack Up Inn this weekend. It was fantastic. Everything about it. They have taken old sharecropper houses and turned them into little houses/rooms for rent. The decorations are basically like living inside booth at an antique store, which if you know me, is a dream! However …… they are literally shacks ….. and when thunderstorms come through the Delta – thunderstorms COME THROUGH the Delta.

We got the first storm about 10ish on Friday night. I watched it roll in from the screen porch, but I didn’t think much about it. Until the tornado sirens starting going off. I was texting a friend and I said, “I’m in a shack in a tornado warning! I don’t know what to do!” and they said, “Don’t do anything …”

So I sat on the floor in the bathroom (again, I’m in shack, this would do nothing really, but the steel, claw foot tub did give me a little bit of comfort). I found the local weather station on my phone and realized the bad stuff was to my south. I climbed in bed and all was well until about 4am when round two of the storms came through. The lightening was so frequent it was like someone had switched a light on outside and it stuck, and the thunder so intense I thought maybe it was coming from my shack. And the wind … oh my word … there is nothing to block it so it just comes straight on through.

I laid in bed and listened to the wind whistle through my door and I thought about the Wizard of Oz.

Then I started thinking about what my friend had said earlier about the storm when I said I didn’t know what to do, “Don’t do anything.” And I realized that this storm was like life. Those storms come blowing through and we immediately think, “I don’t know what to do!” but we start doing things anyway. Sometimes things that make it all worse. Sometimes things that just get us all wound up for no reason. We start trying to fix things that we have no business trying to fix.

“Don’t do anything!”

Just sit and wait it out. Sit and pray through it. Sit and listen to the storm and think about all the ways the storm is beneficial. It might not be that it is beneficial to you personally, but sometimes it is to those around you. Sometimes the storm is how the fruit grows. It is what nourishes our souls. It is what draws us closer to our Savior. The storm has a tendency to wash things that need a good scrubbing.

I laid in bed at 4am and prayed for protection and for rest once it all went through. I thought about the power of the Lord and how he brings about his peace in the storms. I thought about how good the rain was for all of the farmland where I was staying. What felt scary for me was such a blessing for the people who live there. Their livelihood depended on the storm.

I’ve found some peace that I can’t identify lately and I think it’s because I’m just trusting the Lord to work in and out of the storms. I’m just giving him every morsel of myself even if it isn’t the best presentation. I’m allowing HIM to do the work. He doesn’t need my help sometimes. I cannot stop the storm or manipulate the storm. But he can. I'm enjoying life in a way I never have before. 

Sometimes the best thing we can do is nothing. We need to watch the storm roll in, hunker down during the storm, and do nothing. Just let the power of the storm rush over us. Recognize its power, appreciate its offering, and then watch it roll away.