Like a coyote?

Sunday afternoon, as I was driving back home from church, I was listening to our local NPR station.  They were playing some show which featured folk music.  I just caught the tail end of a song that they were playing, followed by a few minutes of the post-song interview with the artist.  Her song really would be more in the "country" genre, it seems to me.  She was singing about why she seemed to hang on to this relationship with her man, even though it wasn't a good relationship.  The chorus, which so seemed "country" to me, was something about her wondering why she was so much like a coyote, liking to hang around dead things all the time.  Doesn't that sound "country" to you?  All she needed was something about a pickup truck and a train, and I think she would have been all set!  And who knows... maybe those things were in the song, too.  As I said, I only caught the last bit of her singing.

After I chuckled at the "country-ness" of the song, though, I began to wonder myself if I'm not like some coyote as well.  What dead things do I tend to hang around?  What dead-end habits do I persist on repeating?  What dead-end world views - of despair, of powerlessness, of hopelessness - do I entertain and also perpetuate?  What dead-end lenses do I insist on using when I think of or see politicians, when I engage in a bitter cynicism that leaves me both angry and despondent about our country's leaders and leader-wannabees?

Maybe, just maybe, I'm more like that ol' coyote in her song than I'd care to admit... even to myself.  Maybe, just maybe, I, too, keep hanging around things that are dead... or things that should be dead, at least to me.  Maybe, just maybe, I ought to spend some time during Lent examining the ways I need to look at different things, or at least look at the same things in different ways.  Maybe, just maybe, I can spend my time and energy, my prayers and reflections, doing away with my persistent coyote ways... and begin to focus on the things that give life, that encourage growth, that promote healthy living and healthy attitudes.

Prayer... fasting... giving.  Those three traditional Lenten spiritual disciplines might just help me here.  I haven't always engaged in those disciplines each Lenten season.  However, I'll bet they can help me chase my coyote-self away.

And all this from just a snippet of some country-sounding song on an NPR radio station.  Ideas do come from surprising places, sometimes, don't they?