It's Sabotage!

I was walking out the front door of my house the other day when I noticed a little friend crawling along the ground at my feet. It was a June bug. There was nothing out of the ordinary seeing a June bug on my front porch. My roommates and I often joked that it was where bugs came to die, mostly because there were hundreds of dead roly-poly carcasses littering the walkway.


You see all those little specks? Yeah, that's right. What you are looking at is an odd conglomerate of pill bugs, beetles, and June bugs (which are beetles, but that's besides the point). Anywhoo, without missing a beat, I proceeded to squish said June bug and head on my way back to work. That is when it hit me.

Now, I have been squishing bugs for years and years and not once have I ever thought there was something wrong with it. Heck, I was that kid who would ride up to a fire ant hill, let the ants climb on my tires, and then take off riding. However, on this particular day, it happen to strike me as odd that I could so easily take something that was once living and snuff it out without a second thought. That got me thinking; if it is this easy for me to do this to a bug, is there something out there that would look at me in the same light. I am not saying that there is something out there looking to squash me like an insect. That’s just paranoid thinking.

No, the real question I pondered was why I so often choose death when life is a choice. It would have been just as easy for me to step over the June bug as it would have been for me to step on it, but I chose the former. I never really thought that my actions carried such dire consequences before. Dire may be a little over dramatic, but you get what I mean.

Jon Acuff wrote in his book Quitter that “night Jon” was ALWAYS the enemy of “day Jon.” He noted that even though he was tired and wiped out, night Jon always wanted to stay up and keep working or watch T.V. Night Jon always knew what his actions meant for day Jon, but would do it anyway. Night Jon was an inconsiderate jerk.

You see the same story all the time.

I was talking with a distressed young lady the other day. She and her parents had been fighting because they did not like the people she was hanging around. She went on to tell me that many of them were in jail and that her ex-boyfriend was killed. She did not understand why her parents were being so obtuse wanted to send her to another state to live with family. Young gal was trying to make decisions that would have serious consequences for future gal.

Some would call that sabotage.

When I was a kid, I used to sabotage myself like crazy. I had this strange notion that I was stupid and would purposely answer questions incorrectly so that others would treat me as such. Fortunately for me, a teacher stepped in and pointed it out. Today me is very grateful that past me listened to that teacher.

So what about you? Have you ever sabotaged yourself? Have you ever made a choice that was of no benefit to yourself or others? How did you handle it when the consequences showed up later?