I’ve spent so much time…
I’ve spent so much time fighting you, Life, and I am truly sorry about that.
I know You don’t need me to be sorry, but my goodness, the way You showed up in the eyes of the coffee shop proprietor yesterday certainly has me rethinking everything.
I come in from the drizzle with two flattened flat-rate shipping boxes under my arm, order my latte. As I’m crumpling my unneeded receipt, he comes back out from the kitchen, shakes open a white kitchen-sized trash bag, and silently holds it out to me over the counter. I go to pop my receipt ball in it, thinking maybe he’s starting a new round of garbage and is giving me the honor of christening it.
No. He nods to the sheaths of cardboard pinned between my elbow and rib cage. Ruffles the bag.
The rain. The boxes.
“Oh!” I say. “Oh how kind. Thank you. I’m actually just going a couple of blocks so it should be fine.”
You’d think I just turned down a wordless marriage proposal. You’d think he’d offered me a precious gift, a golden heirloom. The flash of questioning in his shimmering black eyes, then the resigned sadness. The way he walked away again, his head and the bag drooping. Like I broke his heart.
In a way I think I did. Or rather, he was showing me how I broke Your heart—how I continually break Your heart by rejecting Your offers to make things a little easier, a little more beautiful. How I keep rebuking Your admonishments to stop working so hard to do it all myself. To trust You.
I fly in the face of all this regularly because I am fine. Yesterday in the coffee shop I was fine. I was already wet, and I didn’t mind it. In fact I was kind of enjoying the rain. The boxes were fine—we really did only have a couple of blocks and at worst they’d get a little damp, and then dry out. I didn’t want to “waste” the bag, which of course wouldn’t have been wasted at all… eventually I’d have re-used it, and the shop’s bottom line would go untouched (especially with the six dollars I’d just paid for my single coffee).
I’ve spent so much time rejecting Your generosity this way, and You showed me that undeniably in that moment, in the slumped shape of your emissary (who never said a word, except with those eternal eyes) as he walked away with the unused bag dangling from his hand.
It was a simple gesture on his part, conjured without thinking, executed without effort. It wasn’t heroic or manipulative, gallant or expectant. He wanted nothing in return. It was simply the right thing, the obvious thing. It was the flow of life. Right there.
And in saying no, I staunched that flow. Cut it right off. All at once I saw the entire history, the entire lineage of my rejection of Your help in big and small ways. Every time I say “I’m fine,” I close off the possibility of something more happening. Something sweeter.
I left that generous place, with its golden arabic script adorning the dark teal walls, the place that always feels so peaceful, even when packed to the gills. I walked the two blocks home, coffee in one hand, boxes held against my ribs, getting a little wetter and a lot more broken open. Talking to You but appearing to mumble to myself.
“Oh, I see,” I kept saying. “I see.”
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I wonder: where else am I—are you—are we—being proffered new ways of living by the divine? Where are we being shown the flow, the light, the ease? What wiring, what programming, what habits, what survival instincts in us might be shutting it down? What unassuming players in our lives are actually emissaries of the divine? What would happen if we broke out of our self-reliant bubble, hang on for half a second more, and listened? As usual I welcome your comments and/or entire pieces of writing in the comments. Start with “I’ve spent so much time…” and see where it goes. XO
