Are you sure it’s not you?

By Jeff Becraft

There was no article last week… my wife and I went on an epic trip to see grandkids in Texas and the second part of that trip was hitting some national parks in southern Utah to celebrate 38 years of marriage. There will be several articles that will come out of that trip and this is one of them.

We had started out one morning and we were heading to one of the parks and we stopped at a truck stop. The spaces where the cars get gassed up was full, and so I pulled over to where the trucks get their gas which was right next to us. There were some open spaces over there. When I got out to pump the gas there was mud everywhere in the section I was in. I finished pumping the gas and got back in the car and we are driving down the highway. We are talking to one another and saying, “Boy, you can really smell the cow fields around here.” After about 20 minutes, you could still smell the cow fields.

I finally commented that I hoped that it was not me. I hope that that mud at the truck stop wasn’t cow manure and I haven’t brought that into the car.

A couple of minutes later… as the smell continued… Brenda says to me, “Are you sure it’s not you?”

I look at the bottom of one of my shoes and moaned in a Charlie Brown sort of way, “Aagghhh… it is me!”… and my shoes were caked with cow poop.

Now, there are not many gas stations in southern Utah, but the next exit happened to have one and we pulled over. Brenda went in and bought a bottle of 409 and a roll of paper towels and I went to scrubbing the shoes at the gas station. Thankfully, I had brought a second pair of shoes and so I put those on. I took the “best-as-I-could, cleaned-up” cow shoes, put them in a bag and put them in the back of the car.

Sometimes as we are going down the highway of life, we think it’s something else. We think it’s some circumstance or some person or some situation that’s really causing the problem in our lives. And sometimes we have to ask ourselves, “Are you sure it’s not you?” We need to look in our own hearts and look at our own attitudes and see what is going on there. Sometimes we create our own prisons… because we think it’s something else and we’re blaming everything on that thing or that person. We need to not fret ourselves.

But when we finally recognize what is going on in our own hearts or attitude and can say, “Oh, that bad aroma in my attitude…it’s coming from me” – that’s the beginning of the resolution of the problem. There are many situations and many circumstances in life that we cannot control and we certainly cannot control other people. But we can control what goes on in our own hearts and our own minds.

And once I had dealt with the situation that was really mine and cleaned that up, we could move forward and had an incredible day, enthralled with all the beauty the day had to offer.

Jeff Becraft is the Director of Our Place of Hope and the Director Emeritus for Youth Corps and has dedicated much of his life to helping shift the vision of people’s lives. Our Place of Hope is a paradigm shift for people living with mental illness that encourages them to regain meaning, purpose, and hope for their lives. You can connect with Jeff at  [email protected].