We bought a 5 acre woods to build our new house. The kids enjoyed running around the trees playing, shouting, and hiding. All kinds of treasures where hidden in the woods just waiting for the boys to discover them. The Kids found a host of old car parts, and beer bottles. I guess the formerly vacant woods was a good place for “celebrators" to pitch their beers bottles while driving down the road. The Kids started collecting the beer bottles for cash. It was a long time before we took them to the consignment for a refund. The bottles stood inside by the garage door for a year or more. One day, on my way out of the garage, I was a bit startled when I realized how terrible it looked for a preacher to have a bunch beer bottles sitting by his garage door. It's strange that this had never occurred to me until that moment. I said to myself; "Man this does not look very good". I seriously wondered how many people had traversed in and out this door over the year, each one seeing our collection of beer bottles, and seriously wondered who might have been talking.
The first conversation with myself went like this. "I should hide those Beer Bottles in the corner and cover them." Then I realized; "You know, if I hid them in the corner and they get noticed there, it would look like I was trying to hide them, and that would be even more complicated.
What should I do? Hide them? Leave them where they are?
I reflected on the situation a few brief seconds and settled on leaving them there.
I walked out thinking; "If people coming to my house don’t know me better than that, they will believe anything people say about me anyway." Eventually we took them and dropped them off for a refund – Even that is flamboyantly humorous. The preachers kids making money off of someone else’s beer bottles.
