I was all set to write this week’s Musing about the Blessing Box that’s in front of the church across the street from our house. I’m sure you’ve seen a Blessing Box: a small glass-doored creation in which you can leave a spare can or box of food to help someone who can’t afford to buy food. It’s a simple and anonymous way of helping a neighbor and don’t we need more ways to do that? I might have also mentioned the Blessing Box’s distant cousin the Lending Library, one of those similar take-one-leave-one devices for books that spring up like lovely flowers in someone’s front yard. It’s another wonderful idea, and when I walk by the Little Library down the street from our front door, I always mean to leave behind a book I’ve read so someone else can enjoy it as much as I did. You know, pay it forward, but for free. Anyway, that’s what I was going to write about, but then this happened…
A friend of mine was working in his garden on Saturday afternoon. This friend is an inveterate gardener and his backyard oasis shows off his considerable talent. He was onto his next-to-last chore of the day—pulling weeds—when out of the blue, he stood up, lost his balance, turned around to catch himself from falling, and impaled his right arm on wires protruding from a statue behind him. Those were the very wires he had intended to cut for the final chore of the day so he could go take a shower and get ready to attend the annual Shore Rivers summer gala. The laceration was deep and bloody and so he was off to the Emergency Room, not the gala.
The wound required two layers of stitching: one to repair the badly torn muscle and the other to sew up the lacerated epidermis. It was a serious injury, one, that but for the grace of God, could have been much, much worse. My friend knows this, but nevertheless, he’s blaming himself for being clumsy. I guess that’s a natural human tendency, but one that makes no sense to me. Accidents just happen. In this particular case, no one was to blame: my friend wasn’t pushed, he wasn’t impaired, he just stumbled. He was unlucky. Sure, he was also lucky; he could have lost his arm, even worse. But we always seem to count the loss, never the gain. That’s just human nature.
As I said, accidents happen: they’re unplanned, unexpected, and unintentional. That they often result in injury, damage, or loss makes them all the more troublesome and upsetting, but they are also cautionary tales: we live on an egg shell of a planet spinning through time and space and it’s a miracle that accidents don’t occur more often than they do. I think of all the stupid things I have done over the course of a lifetime that might have ended in disaster but somehow didn’t. Then I learn of a simple stumble in the garden from which all manner of pain and suffering flow and I wonder: how do any of us make it through another day without incurring a major penalty. Or worse.
One of the great mentors in my life once climbed a ladder to clean out his gutters. Somehow, he, too, lost his balance and fell. He never walked again. We wonder why bad things happen to good people, but there’s really no answer to that question other than they just do. God isn’t punishing us or trying to teach us a lesson. He/She is just as distressed as we are, and maybe some measure of divine solace is all we can ever hope for.
Life itself is an accident. Something once crawled out of the primordial muck millions and millions of years ago and now here we are. My friend will carry on and so will we. Sigh.
I’ll be right back.
