A Golf Quote That Applies to Gardening
Loosen Your Girdle!
From TracesofTexas comes a quote to motivate my day. No, I have never played the game of golf, but I grew up admiring this athlete.
“It’s not enough to just hit the golf ball. Sometimes you’ve to loosen your girdle and really let ‘er fly.” ~ Babe Didrikson Zaharias, born in Port Arthur, Texas, and one of history’s greatest athletes
Oh to embrace life today, with the passion that the Babe had for golf. But sometimes my GIRDLE binds. No—not an actual one.
Girdles, something I once wore, aren’t widely used today. But stuff can constrain our lives as tightly. Sometimes it is sorrow, self-centeredness, or down-right silliness – like holding grudges.
If a GIRDLE is limiting my swing,
often I am binding myself with
Grousing,
Irritation,
Rage,
Depression,
Lousy thoughts, and feelings of
Entitlement
When I feel that girdle pinch, I’ve gone beyond F.I.N.E.! (Freaked-out, Insecure, Neurotic, and Exhausted)
Most recent girdle moment:
At the community center, where I exercise, the teen agers crowded around the exit and jostled me. They looked right at me and didn’t see me! Others were so intent they were on their smart phones one almost walked into me.
Grumble, grumble: I did! Nobody has any manners! What a bunch of ______________!
So irritated I was I almost forgot to acknowledge the one kid who held the door for me, as I raged in my head.
Still, I got depressed about being old and useless; more lousy thoughts swarmed, reminding me I am entitled to be better treated.
What’s worse, I never thought to pray for any of them, so busy I was enumerating their lapses.
The teens, for all their buoyancy, each may have had a burden of overwhelming feelings and fears. The others lost on their smart phones may have just gotten news nobody wants. So, in what I perceived as cumulative rudeness, may have been baskets of pain that needed prayer.
But I wasn’t on duty;
I was in the middle of a snit – because my girdle pinched — nobody seemed to see me.
However, the wonder is that in the universe, Somebody does see, and His Spirit supports me. (2 Chronicles 16:9) I have a pulse for a purpose, and it’s not to bind myself with self-pity.
Loosen that girdle girl friend, and remember what Dr. Martin Luther King stated:
Life’s most persistent and urgent question, is what are you doing for others?
Oh! let me loosen my girdle! (That’s what we did back then when we wanted to breathe.) And let me take a swing at the day ahead, and aim for a hole in one!
Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace!
That where there is hatred, I may bring love.
. . . Lord, grant that I may seek rather to comfort, than to be comforted.
To understand, than to be understood.
To love, than to be loved. . . — Prayer of Saint Francis
Loosen that GIRDLE, Gardner!
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