The Choice

8/24/2016

The Lay of the Land

By Lyn Messersmith

The Choice

            “Life is either one grievance after another or one miracle after another.”

            Some Days

            Nancy lives alone, except for her dog. She has some health issues, but who doesn’t, at our age? And Nancy is almost exactly my age.

The thing about Nancy is that she never clings to a grievance when she’s wronged, or when circumstances don’t go her way. And they don’t, pretty often. A few winters back, she slipped on the ice and shattered her arm. The one she uses most, of course. She was in a cast for months, and had to ask for help with dressing and getting from here to there—a pretty hard thing for an independent soul like Nancy to do.

Along about the time all that drama was done, her dog was run over and killed. Now this is a woman who sent me a sympathy card when we had to put our old dog down, so you know how much she loves her pets. I told you that she never gripes, but she does allow herself to grieve.

Let’s go back to the first sentence in this essay. Define grievance. Webster says this, among other things. “A circumstance thought to be unjust or injurious, and ground for complaint or resentment…a statement expressing this, against a real or imagined wrong.”

Grieving is something else; “to feel deep sorrow or distress.” So you know that my friend was grieving deeply from the loss of that dog. At the same time, she knew she wanted another dog, and the sooner the better.

Nancy lives on a fixed income, so it’s not like she could go out and buy a dog, but she prayed about her need for a companion, and then lived in expectation, which is something most of us have no clue how to do. If you need instruction in the matter, as I did, listen to her story.

“Every morning I woke up and said to myself, ‘I wonder if this will be the day I get a dog. I wonder what it will look like, what kind it will be…’”

Less than a week later, Nancy’s phone rang. It was a neighbor, who was moving and couldn’t take her dog. Would Nancy want it?

Not only did she want it, the animal was the same color, size, and breed as the dog that had been killed. Try telling Nancy that miracles' don’t happen.

I believe in miracles, large and small. This one seems pretty large to me. That said, most of us miss them because we’re looking for some kind of burning bush experience. Or too busy expressing a grievance.

Did you happen to be driving home last night just in time to watch the moon rise? See a shooting star, a child laughing; a young person holding the door for that old fellow? Did a neighbor happen along just as you were getting ready to change a tire? Or perhaps you put aside the urge to feel angry and say, “Just my luck,” and looked for a good turn to do instead. That’d be a real miracle for most of us.

We get a choice about these things, and we get the miracles we choose. By the way, Nancy and her pal are living happily ever after. And this isn’t even a fairy tale.

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