By Brad Campbell –

Just a thought to help start your week.

When my brother and I were very young, we enjoyed our visits to Nanny’s house down Campbell Road.  Our entertainment was in spending as much time outside as possible.  We dug holes in the red clay dirt driveway with silver kitchen spoons.  We chased one another around the yard.  And we played ball.

What we really enjoyed, much to the chagrin of the grown-ups, was throwing the ball back and forth to each other, one in front of the little tin-roofed house, and the other behind it near the woods.  The ball, usually a baseball, not a softer tennis ball or a little rubber bouncing ball, but a hard baseball, would bounce across that tin roof with a boom, boom, boom.  We could only get away with that for a few minutes before the front door flung open and we were being scolded yet again for making so much racket.

Part of that fun was in finding the ball when it went rolling.  Whichever one of us boys was behind the house would have to chase the ball into the kudzu.  Whichever one was out front did our best to keep the ball from rolling into the prickly pear!  That’s what we called the big sprawling cactus plants, just like the ones you see here in my picture.  I wish I had photos of those that I remember, but this pretty one from Arizona will serve the purpose.

Those flowers blooming on the cactus are certainly pretty, and Nanny had taught us to respect the beauty in God’s creation, especially her flowers scattered around the yard.  We also learned to respect the stickers on the cactus as well.  All it would take was for the ball to go rolling into the prickly pear one time, we would reach in one time to retrieve the ball, and that one time would remind us why we were to respect the cactus.

It was as if our hands were magnets and those stickers were metal needles instantly attracted to the magnet!  I can almost still feel the pain even now.

In your week ahead, look and enjoy and respect the beauty, but be ever aware of the prickly pear.  Sometimes you see it, you run around it, and you admire it, but you make the mistake of thinking it won’t bite you.  Then you have one little slip-up and pow, the pain of that one mistake!

Satan is roaming, right in plain sight in the front yard, in among the pretty flowers.  Beware what you dare to stick your hands into.  Life-long lessons can be learned in an instant.

Just a thought.