When my cousin Jen and I were little we spent many nights at our grandma's house, getting into all kinds of mischief and laughing ourselves silly.
We were allowed to play anywhere—as long as we stayed away from the river. But surely Grandma wouldn’t care if we just got close enough to look at the river! So look at it we did, and we could hardly believe our eyes when we spotted an old grocery cart halfway submerged in the water. Why it would be just the thing for Grandma! She had a bad knee and when we went grocery shopping she always said how much easier it was to walk with a cart. Why, with her very own cart she'd be able to walk everywhere!
With those thoughts in mind, we scrambled excitedly down the river bank and painstakingly hauled the cart out of the nasty, polluted water. We craftily wheeled it behind the garage and set about getting it spiffed up. After we'd fastidiously gotten all the river muck off of it, we walked down to Northside hardware and used our candy money to buy a can of metallic gold spray paint.
When it was finally ready to be presented, we led Grandma out by the hand, making her promise to keep her eyes closed. When she opened her eyes we expected a squeal of delight, instead I don't think we'd ever done anything to aggravate her more.
"Where did you girls get that? Why, people will think I stole it! Take it right back where you found it!”
Back to the Rouge River?? Since we weren't supposed to be anywhere near the Rouge River we could hardly tell her we got it out of the river.
We tried telling her how nice it would be—she’d be able to walk everywhere. She wasn’t seeing the beauty of it, she was just desperate to have it off her property.
I admit there was a certain amount of pleasure giving our bright gold cart a big push and watching it careen down the river bank and splash back into the filthy water. But who could forget the image of the Indian chief paddling through polluted water with a tear running down his cheek? Everyone was supposed to give a hoot and not pollute, but Grandma did say take it back where we found it, so there you go, it had to be done.
Beauty certainly is in the eye of the beholder, isn't it? What we saw as a beautiful ticket to freedom, Grandma saw as an ugly contraption that would only serve to label her as a common criminal.
We are all guilty at times times of caring too much what other people think of us, when all that really matters is what God thinks of us. I used to think my Grandma cared way too much what “the neighbors” would think, but the older I got the more I started caring, too. My dad used to say, “You’d be surprised how little they think of you at all.” I don’t know of anyone who cared less about what mere man thought about him than my dad did, and there isn't a day that goes by that I don't try to emulate his determination to live a life pleasing to the Lord and not let the opinions of those around him give him one single moment of concern.
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