Too Prissy To Escape....

I was recently watching a movie in which the protagonist was trying to escape unjust captivity. After being blocked from several escape routes, the heroine looks down and sees an exit through what appears to be a muddy, grimy, sewage gutter or something similar. I immediately cringe. “Ewww, yuck,’” is all I can think to myself! My mind is more fixated on ‘disgusting’ when it should be focused on ‘freedom’. I notice that the crowd around me is shouting, “Go!” and “Hurry!” at the screen. It occurs to me at that moment that my prissiness would have kept me captive because of hesitation at the unpleasant condition that might have been my only means of escape. Hours after the movie was over I am still pondering my hesitation at the escape route. It’s not the first time I had thought that way. My thoughts take me back to Morgan Freeman as Red narrating the escape route of Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption. “Andy crawled to freedom through five hundred yards of shit smelling foulness I can't even imagine, or maybe I just don't want to. Five hundred yards... that's the length of five football fields, just shy of half a mile.” As much as I love that movie and as much as my spirit leaps to see Andy get his much deserved freedom, I still cringe every single time I watch him crawl through that human sewage. I ask myself, “What idiot hesitates at a chance of freedom because the escape route isn’t ‘clean’ enough?” “Me,” I reply in shame. And that is why I find myself mentally stuck in so many places in life. I want a clean escape. I don’t want to get dirty ‘going through’ anything. The greatest stories in literature are comprised of characters that went ‘through’ some sort of battle, suffering, or discomfort in order to get to their destined point. I become ashamed when I make the connection that Jesus Christ himself went through some of the most torturous of all struggles BEFORE he claimed the victory of resurrection. Who am I that should be hurdled over my obstacles rather than going through them? What hero/heroine ever got the end of the story immaculate and unblemished? One of my favorite Psalms, Psalm 40:1-3 says “1 I waited patiently for the LORD; he turned to me and heard my cry. 2 He lifted me out of the slimy pit, out of the mud and mire; he set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand. 3 He put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to our God. Many will see and fear the LORD and put their trust in him.” The light-bulb goes on. For God to lift one out of the mud and mire, it must have been necessary to God for that person to first be in it. I am about to go through some things in life that I have been avoiding for a long time for fear of being ‘uncomfortable’ and ‘getting dirty’. But I’ve hesitated in front of possible exits for far too long. © 2012, June by Stacey Lynne Lewis as SoulofaPoet All rights reserved.