Make your mistakes, take
your chances, look silly, but keep on going. Don’t freeze up. Thomas Wolfe, You
Can’t Go Home Again
Three of us stood there in a church parking lot, puzzling
over a question of what to do. One had found a driver’s license of someone we
didn’t know, but whose home address appeared to be just a matter of being five
or six blocks away. Perhaps it had been dropped while the owner was out for a
walk. Perhaps it had been tossed from a stolen wallet. Whatever the case, it
was up to the three of us – three wise men (or at least the wisest men in the
parking lot at the time, for we were alone) – to decide what to do.
The first to speak up said, “Verily, we should drop the
license into a mail box that some letter carrier might deliver it upon his or
her appointed rounds!”
We pondered the idea for a moment, but worried that such a
small thing as a driver’s license might easily be lost in the vast expanse of
the average drop box.
Another suggested driving it down to the police station so
that someone from the local constabulary might deliver it or contact the owner
to come down and get it. But no one was heading in that direction, and it seemed
to us it would be very inconvenient for the licensee to have to go shagging
after it (if the PD should deign to notify him).
So we studied the license carefully and confirmed that the
owner only lived a few blocks away, and it would be quickest just to go deliver
it directly to him. The only problem was that the street we were on did not go
through to the address we needed to find. The three of us scratched our collective
heads as we discussed the various routes we might take to find the man’s house,
but every option seemed to be blocked by woods, cliffs, or dead-ends.
Two of the gentlemen standing there in the parking lot have
lived in town for most of the past sixty years, so I deferred to them for their
knowledge of the geography, but when they couldn’t figure exactly how to get to
where they wanted to go, I finally suggested we just look it up. I pulled out
my cellphone, put the address into the map app and, voila! I had the route with
an estimated arrival time of two minutes. Ironic, as we’d been discussing it
for about five!
This reminds me of the old joke of why the ancient
Israelites wandered in the wilderness for forty years – because Moses was too
stubborn to stop and ask for directions!
So anyway, one of my compatriots knew immediately where the
address was and offered to take it over, so that was that.
It is amazing how good it feels to do something nice. It
makes me wonder why anyone would ever want to do something bad, naughty, or
destructive. While I may not always BE nice, I find it just feels so good I
can’t imagine why anyone would want to spend any time in that other space –
that negative, dirty, rotten, scoundrel zone.
I suppose that’s one reason I have made being part of a
community of faith a central part of my own identity.
I look back on the three old coots trying to figure out how
to solve the mystery of the lost-license-now-found, and when we were done,
laughing about how simple deciding what to do had been. We hadn’t gotten all
caught up in trying to top one another, or angling for rewards, or anything
like that.
We had simply talked, putting our thoughts out on the breeze
for everyone to hear and consider, played in the metaphorical mud-hole for a
few minutes until the eyes became clearer, and then ultimately did that which
was most neighborly.
Maybe if people spent more time talking with one another
face to face rather than device to device, we’d find more solutions to more of
the world’s problems. Seeing a smile light up a face in person has no parallel
in the world of gizmos and gadgets, although it is sure nice having an app tell
me where to go and how to get there here in this, our valley.
