The sweetest little moment of my one-year old falling to sleep for her morning nap nestled in her pink blanky and my arms was rudely interrupted this morning. As we gently rocked in our cushy recliner one tiny-winged black-bodied housefly kept landing on us!

The dang thing would jump-fly from my arm to my hand and even to my face! I would swat it away, and almost immediately, it was back and bugging my barely sleeping baby! She would snort and shift and dislodge it momentarily, just to have it switch back to landing on me.

After a fun morning was slipping away with an increasingly cracky-tired little girl, I was so enjoying my moment of peacefulness and rest with her. EXCEPT FOR THE STUPID FLY!!!

Anyway, I tried to just ignore it. Then I tried to swing quickly and quietly with my hand to snatch it. These precious few seconds of constantly interrupted cuddling had to end. It was time for the fly to DIE!

I put the baby down and picked up a proper swatter. Right away, I spied the annoying insect and BAM!

Ahhh… all better… at least until another comes along 🙂

So there, your key to life for the day. Something to take with you and use as you see fit. Got it? Good.

Okay… Okay…

How often in our worlds are we just trying to enjoy the bigger picture, to appreciate our blessings and to be contented among the overall goodness of the day… Only to have a small but exquisitely irritating problem distracting us completely! That happens to me all the time! I am so fortunate in my life and blessed beyond words! Yet often I find my mind focused on a tiny issue that consumes all my attention!

Maybe it’s a problem at work. Maybe it’s a list of undone tasks. Maybe it’s money or a relationship or car trouble. Maybe it’s a broken cell-phone or that tiny voice in the back of my brain nagging negatively about almost EVERYTHING!!

Well, the other day that voice got the SWAT! Walking through the store in the afternoon, my mind was buzzing with mental gar-bage and just like that tiny housefly, I had to stop what I was doing and KILL IT!

SHUTUP! I yelled quietly into my own mind! I don’t think anyone around me heard it 🙂 but that little voice sure did. Immediately, it stopped. The train of troubles steaming along between my ears was vaporized instantly!

Sometimes we are not going to be able to just ignore these small but powerful annoyances. Sometimes we can’t just co-exist with our issues. We shouldn’t have to learn to enjoy the feeling of the flies in our lives crawling all over our skin. At some point, we have to just decide to stop what we’re doing and deal with the thing itself! Just kill it and rejoice in our action.

No, it’s not a permanent solution. There will always be another problem ahead, but we can’t continue to ignore these things until we are covered head to toe and pretend that we’re fine all the time.

Luckily this week, I was annoyed enough to just tell my own brain to SHUTUP! Luckily I was irritated enough to just set my sleepy girl in the chair and kill that dang housefly. Doing something about the problem always beats trying to just live with it, like it doesn’t really exist…

Until next week my friends, kill all your flies and relish it!

Sincerely,

Aaron Nichols