Divine humor

My aunt wrote yesterday to tell me that her camera, which went missing over Labor Day weekend while she was at home in Aspen, turned up three days later in her son’s car at Zion National Park. At the end of the fairly brief account, she implied that this was a story I should include in my blog.

It’s a little bit second-hand for my standards of blogging, but it’s a useful story to me anyway because it reminds me of how much I savor these little moments of grace. We all pay attention when bad things happen, and use those moments to contemplate the nature of Fate, or of God, or of luck and happenstance, or whatever governing force each of us believes in. And so too when really significant good things happen, like the arrival of a baby or an unexpectedly encouraging medical diagnosis. But it’s also important to acknowledge the trivial blessings – such as when you find a missing camera.

My theory is that these moments serve as proof that the Divine can be whimsical. It is one thing to believe that there is a guiding spirit who controls life-or-death matters; it is quite another to believe that this same spirit takes time to attend to the most trivial of circumstances. If God is working on the outcome of conflict in the Middle East, we might wonder, why would God take a moment to reveal that a lost camera fell between the seat cushions in someone else’s car?

A couple of months ago, I needed to find a store receipt so that I could make a return, but the receipt had been stuffed somewhere in a folder that held hundreds of other receipts, filed in no particular order. “I just don’t have time to go through these,” I thought. “The only way I’ll be able to do the return is if the receipt simply appears in front of me.” The next receipt I plucked out of the stack was the one I needed. And then a day or two later, I was setting up my mother’s new computer and couldn’t figure out how to access the wireless network at my parents’ house. I guessed at several different passwords and then suddenly, almost randomly, hit on the right one.

I love these Divine surprises. It’s as if once in a while the powers that be take a break from really important problems to just play a little friendly joke on us: something whose outcome really doesn’t matter all that much compared to, say, war or illness, but just makes us feel smiled upon. That’s how I felt when I hit on the wireless code and when I found the receipt, and my aunt’s camera story reminded me of this feeling: the sense that you’re just being given a small but meaningful gift even though it’s not a special occasion. Moments of grace, just sprinkled in our paths to remind us of the importance of taking time to acknowledge gratitude.