Maybe you’re like me. Maybe you’d like to have a bit of control over some of the universe, at least the part that affects you.
Fact is, there’s a great deal we can’t control. We have choices, yes. We can decide how to respond to the curve balls life throws us.
But we don’t get to throw the ball.
This year started out weird. First my cat dies on New Years Eve. Two days later, my dear old friend Irene passes. And last week, my son Sam lands in the hospital just in time to have his rupturing appendix removed.
I’ll get over losing Gizmo. I’ll honor and miss Irene. And I’m so very grateful that Sam is okay. But I feel vulnerable, you know?
In Solomon’s words:
“It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting, for this is the end of all mankind, and the living will lay it to heart.”–Ecclesiastes 7:2
Generations earlier, Moses penned this:
“The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty … they are soon gone, and we fly away… So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom. — Psalm 90:10-12
Evidently, it’s not wise to deal with life’s surprises by indulging in comfort foods and ignoring the delicate nature of our lifespans.
I need to allow those curve balls to engender some reflection. I need to remember that life is really quite short.
I need to develop a heart of wisdom.
It’s the weird circumstances, the close calls, the things beyond our control –those times teach us something vital.
We are all so fragile, really.
Years ago, I answered a knock on my door, and there stood my friend, ashen-faced. As she and her husband were coming down our long gravel driveway, they’d seen my then 12-year-old son Danny reach for a live electric wire that had come down in a storm.
They shouted. He stopped.
Fast forward five years. I’m sitting with another friend following her grown son’s funeral. He died in an electrical accident.
It finally hits me. For one long hellish moment, I actually feel it, the reality that Danny could have died.
The weight of that crushes the breath out of me.
If I felt the full impact of all the things that could have happened to me and mine over the years, it would be too much to bear.
A merciful God spares me from processing all the possibilities. He has also, no doubt, spared me from countless other tragedies of which I am totally unaware.
This unawareness, too, is a mercy.
As a teenager, Danny was goofing around with a friend at church when he lost his balance and toppled off the platform, shoulder first, to the hard floor below.
The impact snapped his collarbone in two.
I almost fainted looking at the X-ray. Danny still has a lump in his collarbone.
I have a mark on my soul.
Then there’s the time our youngest was driving his grandparents to the airport on an icy winter morning when he lost traction and the vehicle rolled three times (read more here).
When I first saw Jed after the accident, I fell apart. He could have died. He only scratched his ankle.
Now Sam is recuperating from his close call, and I reflect again: We are all so fragile, really. We are so not in control.
God, thank you for your protection. Teach us to ponder the value of our brief lives.
Give us a heart of wisdom.
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