Today I came home, and my truck was covered from hood to tailgate in mud. A consequence of where I live. I live in Iowa where the soil is our most valuable resource. It provides the ground, literally, for a multimillion dollar industry called agriculture. This industry feeds the world. But for all its benefits, the resource of soil can every now and then become a bit hazardous.
Iowa also happens to have all four seasons, Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter. With the onset of warm weather and a rainy Spring, soil turns to mud. The frost is pushing up out of the ground turning gravel roads into a boggy nightmare. Add some thunderstorms and you get ruts only the bravest dare to drive a low clearance car through. So if you have to drive anywhere on gravel you can forget keeping your vehicle clean.
As someone who spends a good deal of their time working outside it doesn’t take long to get dirty in the Spring. A splash here, a misstep there, and before you know it you’ve got mud all over. You get used to it after a while. Oftentimes I come home at the end of the day and look in the mirror to find that I’ve had mud spatters on my face all day!
Mud reminds me of my mistakes in writing. I can start out with something fabulous, but if I let it get watered down then it can turn into a sticky situation. From an overthought storyline to the little spatters of poor punctuation, it can sneak up on you if you let yourself get used to it.
Learning to see the mud in my writing has at times been a difficult process. But God has been gracious in allowing me to find people to help remove the mud from my writing. The bonus from this is that it keeps me honest in writing and it teaches me to become better at my craft. So thank you God for lessons learned from mud!