This past Monday I sat with a psychologist, a required part of the discernment process for becoming a priest.
We talked about my positive outlook on life. You see when you come across as exceptionally positive on personality tests, the irony is that they think you’re being deceptive.
I made no apologies to the psychologist for my positivity. The best I could do was quote Anne Frank as I have many times before. “In spite of everything,” she said, “I still believe people are good at heart.”
Anne Frank wasn’t naïve. She lived through the worst of the Holocaust and would eventually die in a concentration camp, but she chose a positive outlook because she felt she had to, to believe the opposite, to believe that some people had nothing but evil in their hearts was too horrible for her to live with. So she chose to be positive. She chose hope.
Living a positive life is not easy. Two days after I met with the psychologist, the air conditioning in my house broke. It’s Florida. It’s July. It’s a little hot without air. I called out the repairman, thinking it would be a quick fix. But here it is five days later and I still don’t have air.
It’s never a good thing when the repairman tells you that you have a worst case scenario problem. It’s never a good thing when the repairman dumps you because the job is too big for him.
At first, I was very angry at the situation. I felt helpless and just flat out angry and bitter. The bitterness turned to tears but on Friday morning I woke up with a kind of acceptance. Just like with my car accident a few months ago, things are always going to happen to us that are beyond are control and once we admit that, we can better turn it over to God.
Even in the midst of sweltering heat and increasing humidity (this afternoon, the humidity got to my light fixture which lost its grip on the ceiling and plummeted a few inches and is now hanging precariously by a wire), I try and look for the good. I try and look for my pockets of light.
I found three this past week. I found it in the first air conditioning repairman who after charging me $200 for the work he did on Wednesday, returned the money to me on Friday, saying his conscience wouldn’t let him keep it considering the air still wasn’t fixed.
I found it in the downstairs neighbor I didn’t know I had who let me and a strange man (the repairman) into her condo after knowing me all of twenty seconds so we could check the pipes that ran through her unit. We had a good chat and after living here for three years, she’s the only neighbor I now know by name.
I found it on Friday afternoon when I got home from the store with my new room air conditioner and discovered that getting it up the stairs was going to be impossible. Behind me a man was wandering around, checking out my condo building, looking like he was waiting for someone. That someone turned out to be me. He offered to help and carried up that massive box to the second floor.
I thank God for those people because I believe, like Anne Frank, that people want to do good, that people want to do the right thing and that we should work in this life to give people every opportunity to do that.
Doing good for others feels … good. It feels right. It completes us because when we do right by others, we have a Jesus moment as we become the people God intended us to be.
With the air still broken, there will be lots of opportunities for me to see the good in others. There will be lots of opportunities for God to use a bad situation and turn it into good.
