This is going to be the last in our series inspired by spooking things.  We began by reflecting on being haunted by self-doubt and ghosts.  From there, we thought about vampires who drain our willpower.  This week is about scarecrows and scary situations.

In case you aren’t from the corn belt of the United States, a scarecrow is a fake person/creature that farmers make and put in their fields.  Its entire purpose is to be spooky and ominous in order to scare the crows away.  Supposedly, what happens is that a crow goes flying around ready to land on the field to eat the corn, and then they see the scarecrow and say, “That looks pretty scary.  I’m going to leave that field alone.”  The interesting thing about all of this is that scarecrows are stationary objects, who are just there to LOOK scary.  They can’t actually do anything.  They just stand there.  If the crows pay attention they could quickly see that the scarecrow isn’t actually worth being afraid of, because it doesn’t really pose a danger to them. 

You’re probably wondering what scarecrows have to do with anything.  I don’t know about you, but sometimes I find myself afraid of scarecrows in my life.  Sometimes, I find myself looking down a path filled with looming obstacles.  From a far these challenges look scary and cause me to feel anxious/nervous.  Do you ever feel yourself feeling this way?  Do you ever feel yourself looking at challenges you’ll face and saying, “I wonder how I’ll ever find a way through that.”?  When I’m in this state of mind, I find myself paralyzed.  I find myself tempted to avoid the situation, in the same way that crows are tempted to avoid a field guarded by a scarecrow.

While I might be afraid, the truth is that so many of the problems we face in our lives are actually scarecrows.  What I mean is that so many of the problems we have are things that loom off in the distance and appear to be intimidating/daunting/scary/impossible.  However, if we would take a moment to observe, we could quickly realize that thing we are afraid of isn’t all that intimidating and it’s rarely as bad as we think it will be.  Often, as we get closer to these daunting problems, we realize that we’ve always had the strength to conquer them, even though we lost sight of this while we were scared.

In short, many times the problems in our life are only as strong as we allow them to be.  Just as crows can see that a scarecrow is nothing more than something a farmer made, we have the power to look at our problems and realize that often they aren’t anything too large for us to handle.

The challenge: Do you see the challenges you face for the scarecrows they are?

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry