Posts Tagged: wisteria

“One Tangle at a Time”

On June 9, 2020 by Dteb With 0 Comments - down to earth believer

We are re-staining the deck and some surrounding woodwork. As with all tasks, there are always pre-tasks to do. One of them was taking down some lights that my wife had put up around the woodwork. There is a catch. We have wisteria.

Wisteria is a wonderful plant. It is tough and grows fast. It vines and can provide some wonderful shade.

However (why is there always a however?), the wisteria and the strings of light seemed to be getting along a little too well. They weren’t quite married, but they seemed to be headed in that direction.

I got to one place where I wasn’t sure that I could disengage the wisteria and the lights. So, I mulled the alternatives. I could cut the wisteria. No! I don’t like killing living things. Houseflies, ants (when in the house), and poison ivy are exceptions.

Or, I could give up on this strand of lights. However, I am rather frugal, so that didn’t seem to be a good alternative.

Somewhere I read or heard that if you have only two choices, you don’t have a choice. Instead, you have a dilemma. So, I tried to think of a third possibility. And sometimes when I slow down and think, I actually have a thought.

I said to myself, “Well, why not start trying to slowly disentangle the wisteria from the light, and see what happens?” So, that is what I did. And within a couple of minutes, I had succeeded. The plant, the lights, and I all breathed a sigh of relief.

Is there a point to this story? There is!

All of my life, I have been pretty tangled. And I have longed—indeed, lusted—for a quick and easy solution. And my quick and easy solutions were indeed quick but were almost never easy. In fact, that weren’t even solutions. They simply deepened the original problem and created some new problems.

There is a verse that says,

“Desire without knowledge is not good,

and whoever makes haste with his feet misses his way.”

(Proverbs 19:2, English Standard Version)

Slow down, dear reader—and dear self! Be content to make a little progress! One tangle at a time. One tangle at a time.

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