Spackled Faith

 

Other peoples’ problems tend to fall into two boxes. The first batch are those about which you might have suggestions, nudges or downright solutions, though the likelihood of you being heard -- let alone of having your advice followed -- falls, preternaturally, between un-bloody-likely and no-flippin’-way. You can feel a touch of remorse for those who don’t grok what you are explaining in daylight-obvious terms, or maybe scorn, but it’s likely a habit with them...they who stumble over air.

The second set are those issues that you’re, phew, quietly relieved not to have to face yourself. You don’t know from where they summon the strength to overcome -- or simply meet -- the sort of adversity whose very idea chills you to the bone.

For instance, I don’t want to ever get sick, as in having to go into the hospital. My do-not-resuscitate plan pulls the plug just the other side of a debilitating flu. I don’t want to do the chemo thang or radiation. I don’t want to feel like death trying to cheat it. If there is a god, I’d like to make it through to an end which comes without pain or warning. I want to go to sleep with a smile on my face and have it in place when my body is discovered.

There are surely some people who would look at my life and be glad for their own problems. Especially, those folks who don’t like uncertainty. They need their moorings, and the more tied down they feel the better. Oh, but there are times when I have rued my first wife leaving, or my leaving a job that was stimulating and paid decently because I felt compelled to leave.

I might opine that every life has the same amount of struggle in it; some suggest that no one is given a greater burden than he can carry. Some people don’t accept the load and check out. Others assume more than they can bear and are buried by it. They rest of us muddle through as best we can, taking pleasure here, giving it there.

Conferring with my confrere Bruce the other day, I averred, "There is a plan and just because I didn’t come up with it doesn’t mean I don’t have to follow it." My objection is that the plan, of whatever origin, is not a published work, and we or it doesn’t come with an instruction manual. Some people use faith to bridge the gaps between expectation and reality. There are moments when I earnestly wish they sold it in pill form.

And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.

 

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