Crabs. Yeah, You Know The Kind I Mean

If you left children to interpret all of our adult jabberings, someone would end up having crabs.

For real.

When I was a kid, my mom (sorry, Mom, gotta' out ya' here) used to have this one woman I remember she particularly didn't like. At all. Any time she head that gal's name (come to think of it, I don't even know what it was), she'd commence her death spin of name-calling and curse-uttering, usually ending with a muttered chorus of "She has it all." (You're going to have to imagine the tone of disgust).

I din't know what that woman had. But I will tell you that my somewhere-near-9 year old mind grasped that "it" was something one "had" and that "having" it was bad. I mean, B-A-D. Now, it pays to know here that my brother was four years ahead of me in school. Which, for the purposes of this little narrative, meant he was taking Health class. Which also meant he and his friends were lazing around the house one afternoon discovering the horrors of having "it". The only word I could make out before I was resolutely relocated from the room was "crabs." 

And the association was born.

Is this what my mother meant when she said the poor woman had "it" all?

Shivers.

It was a rough next 4 or 5 years, I tell ya', always fearing the claw-footed creatures would infect me in some way. That museum visit to the crustacean exhibit was particularly rough. But then came my turn for Health class - and an especially growdy slide show that proffered the pictorial debut of (among others) crabs. Don't pretend you don't know the kind I mean. The guest speaker, who was probably either fired or relocated to the lunch room, cautioned us - full screen shot behind her pointing finger - on all the manners and methods by which we might contract "it". 

By the end of the school year, my friends thankfully enlightened my ridiculously stupid innocently naive mind that, no, the mother-nemesis was not suffering from an infestation of crabs. Of either kind. Don't pretend you don't know that other kind I mean. If you want total honesty (as if you haven't gotten a serious dose of THAT in this post), I'm not sure I completely grasped the meaning of "it" until...well...right now.

Yep. And this time, I can't even blame it on my mind - whatever its state. Oh, I've long known what my mom  meant by "it": that singular combination of measurements (wallet, house, husband, kids, and 36-24-36) women obsess about. 

Okay, so maybe gals like my  mom might, in that same death spin, mutter about me having it all. I do have a house. I do have a husband. I have a kid; in fact, I've three of them. (The measurements I discard: they're total poo and have been always). I am blessed with shelter, with provision, with love. Isn't that the "it"?

But I'd refuse their premise. "It" isn't any of those things, for that definition centers on status. On materialism. On the temporal. I suppose I do have it all, if by "it" you mean purpose and place. If you mean love and acceptance. If you mean value and vision. That definition centers on identity. On the best depths. On the eternal.

I have it all because I have Him.

Now, if no piece of that story convinced you and you're guffawing, "Nah. I'm not buying. What's one got to do with another?" Well in return, let me ask you this: Who else but God could get a ridiculously stupid innocently naive sold-out-for-Him mind from child to adult by using crabs - and you know the ones I mean - as a stepping stone?

Yeah. 

Think about that.