Training my Parrot

The days were filled with an unutterable amount of things to do. Being in the oldest part of a large family whose schedule was filled with touching lives outside our tribe as well as within was a delightfully, crazily busy season of life! In fact, my memories of our schedule could resemble a jelly filled cookie. The dry cookie part was the schedule and the jelly was all the miscellaneous things that stuck in all the cracks and made life rich and FULL! I loved it. But sometimes I was tired.

Way back then, the big thing on the proverbial horizon was a three month trip to Africa. Folks, it looked huge. How was I going to be able to do this? Part of the culprit behind the I have since learned that my imagination is like a beautiful parrot that I am in the process of trying to train (it can be a really wonderful part of life, but it can also lie to me about the future and be quite annoying). However, I wasn’t fully aware about the snares of my imagination back then and it went flying about my mind, chattering and chittering about all kinds of possible events in the future. For example, 

“You’re lying on a one-inch mattress in an unbearably hot room, so weak that you can’t even walk to the bathroom. You’re unutterably embarrassed by this, because what if the most intimidating of the people who will be over there is the one who will care for you? And you’ll be so sick you can’t eat and they’ll have to take you to the hospital to get an IV; imagine how that will feel! You never got one of those before, so that makes it Scary. Then you might get so sick you almost die, and prayer chains will be starting for you back in the states, and you will start losing consciousness...imagine how that will feel!” - at which point I would shudder and try my best to change the subject, or evade the topic; for the immensity of how that might feel was too horrible to consider!

Or the “parrot” might say, 

“You won’t be able to handle the food over there. They say it’s horrible...think compost. You know, the slimy rotting goo in the bucket that didn’t get cleaned? Yeah, you know they say the food is fermented, so it’s possibly like that. How will you ever get that down your throat?! You’re already underweight, so this could be really dangerous to your health. Unless they force you to eat it. You’ve heard they do that, haven’t you! That would be another story in its own -“

Photo by Philip MacKenzie

And so forth, on and on the Imagination would chatter about the Future and how on earth will I ever be able to handle it? 

Well, one day I had a good realization interrupt that parrot. “Maybe you should talk back.” It said. “Tell your imagination what to think. Write it down, so you don’t forget it: 

‘I wonder what His grace will feel like, then?’”

So I started trying it out. It really did help. I believe I even wrote it on a sticky note and put it where I would see it every day. I started entering those future moments in my mind with a curiosity that actually helped: 

“What would it feel like to be surrounded by GRACE in that moment?! I never felt that amount of grace before! That would be incredible!”

Since I have already lived through those three months by now, I can tell you that they went absolutely wonderfully. I was sick only one day, and I received such a good attitude to go with the sickness that I laughed more than usual and didn’t feel overwhelmed in the least! The food was rarely a challenge for me, and when it was, I enjoyed rising to meet it with a spirit of adventure. The people who intimidated me became good friends and in short everything I feared fell flat before the goodness and grace of the Lord.

It’s good for me to remember those days.

Since that time, I’ve had both easier and rougher seasons of life. Some of the seasons I felt like the negative things the parrot said were true. But there was always grace. Sometimes I chose to breathe in the fumes of self-pity, and THOSE were the toughest times.

Naturally, there are new things in front of me now that my inescapable parroting imagination chatters about. It’s a timely reminder to me to spend some time training my "parrot" to trade asking me “how awful would that feel?” for

“I wonder what God’s grace would feel like THEN!”