A Moment of Clarity

It took seeing them bring her out on a stretcher to make me realize the depths of my own absurdity.  There she was, frail and weak, and it struck me suddenly how tenaciously I'd clung to all those old grudges that ultimately mean nothing in the light of all the good intentions piled up on the other side of the scale.  As they loaded her gently into the back of the Metro amubulance in the darkness of the cold night, I let go of those old frustrations and made my peace with that piece of my past.

I can't count the Sundays we'd been herded into that classroom and told dubious things about Jesus.  As my own understanding of the Bible grew, so, too, did my personal frustration level.  By the time I was a senior, I had stopped going to Sunday School at all.  I would not be disrespectful, and since that was the year my parents told me that I didn't have to go anymore, I took myself out of a situation that caused me an endless form of tearing inside.

Over the years, friction continued to be there.  The basic conflict just never went away.  I kept it there like a piece of sandpaper, rubbing my thumb across it, constantly feeling that grit abraiding me instead of somehow doing what even that simplest of bivalves is capable of, wrapping it in something smooth and creating something of beauty of it.

Why did I do that?  I would have and have done that for most other people I know, even those with far fewer redeemed qualities than she.  I have consciously forced my mind to the positive, sought that which would enable me to see the gold among the pebbles, laughed at myself for my own grumpiness.  Here, though, for years, I have been unwilling to see her as a person and value her accordingly, and for that I am deeply and most humbly sorry.  She has always been only the monster of those long-ago Sundays, and she didn't deserve that blindness, that disdain from me.  Nobody does from anyone. 

It's horrible but necessary to be shown that you aren't what you think you are from time to time, to have that moment when your own blinders about yourself and others are painfully ripped away to force you to look honestly at yourself and your own behaviors.  I will take what I learned in those lightning flashes of the emergency vehicles strobes and try to remedy these faults.  I just wish the revelation had come earlier.