I've had a wonderful birthday week, filled to the brim with loving gifts, goodness and blessings. But it also contained one particularly difficult situation with a friend, with an unpleasant outcome that I was really hoping would turn out otherwise. Time and again, I allowed it to cast dark shadows over my joy in the past few days. This afternoon, feeling chagrin at finding myself focused on this one challenging circumstance yet again, an old Irish story came creeping out from some distant corner of my memory bank. Thankfully, it helped me put things back in perspective...
SOMETHING NEW
It happened in the spring of 1912, when the members of the Clark family were making final preparations for emigrating from their home in Ireland to the wide-open spaces of America, fabled land of limitless opportunities. This was the moment that Mr. Clark and his wife had been working, scrimping and saving towards for years, no easy feat during the lean decades following the Great Irish Potato Famine. It had taken all of their resources, but finally they had scraped together enough money to buy passage for themselves and their nine children.
But then, just seven days before their departure, their youngest son was playing in the street where he was bitten by a stray dog. Fortunately, the wound wasn't too bad; unfortunately, because the possibility of rabies was a real and present danger in those days before a rabies vaccine became widely available, the family was placed under quarantine for two weeks. The rules were strict and no appeal was possible. The Clarks would not be able to leave the country as planned, after all.
NOTHING DOING
Mr. Clark was heart-broken. A week later, he stomped down to the harbor and watched angrily as the brand new ocean liner pulled away from the dock as scheduled, but without him and his family onboard. Shaking his fist at the heavens, he cursed both his son and the God who would let such misfortune happen to a well-meaning, hard-working man like himself.
But after five days, news arrived that the mighty Titanic had struck an iceberg and sunk in the Atlantic, taking 1,500 of the 2,224 people aboard down with her, most of them working class passengers travelling in the steerage compartments below deck - which is where the Clarks would have been, had their son not been bitten by the stray dog.
When Mr. Clark heard the news, he hugged his son with joy, astonished at how their "bad luck" had become their good fortune -- then fell to his knees and thanked God for sparing their lives.
EVERYTHING CHANGES
It's so easy to slip back into the habit of telling Spirit how much better off I'd be if only things were as they "should be" in my life; it's so much more powerful to feel peace and gratitude for the circumstances of my life, just the way they are - just for now. And now. And now...
With gratitude and blessings,
Rudi
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