The Wisdom of Foolishness

My family is trying to get rid of a TV, so we put it in front of our driveway with a "FREE" sign on it. There have been no takers yet, nor are there now likely to be. This afternoon, walking home from the bus stop, I saw the TV and the clouds overhead, and I thought "We should probably move the TV in case it rains tonight," but I didn't say anything like that to my family. I suppose I was afraid of sounding silly. After all, why should we care if the TV gets rained on? We don't want it anymore anyway. And, for all I know, TVs are okay with getting wet as long as they dry out before you plug them in. If the others didn't think it was a big enough of an issue to be worth bringing up, I wasn't going to bring it up, either. But, sure enough, it started to rain, and I still had the impression that maybe we didn't want the TV to get too wet, for whatever reason. So, there I was a few minutes ago, out on my driveway in the rain at 11 o'clock at night, awkwardly carrying the TV onto the shelter of the porch, all because I had been too embarrassed to ask for help in moving it earlier, before it started to rain.

Spiritual promptings don't always sound like spiritual promptings, and people sometimes do stupid things (or stupidly fail to do smart things) because they're afraid of looking stupid. The moral of the story, as far as I'm concerned, is that I need to get over my fear of appearing foolish for acting on what feels like a whim, because all too often, I fail to do something I was thinking about doing, and I later find out that it was important for me to do it. I'd like to stop making that mistake. I'd like to follow spiritual promptings more often, including the ones I don't recognize as spiritual promptings. And if that means acting impulsively sometimes and doing things just because I feel like I should do them, even if I don't know why, I hope I have the courage to say "so be it," and move the TV onto the porch before it starts to rain.