A few years ago, the young daughter of a friend of mine found herself sitting in an ant pile during a break in soccer practice.
As her mother brushed the ants off of her, the young girl, remembering that her brother had problems with ants the day before, looked up at her mom and said, “It was my turn in the ant pile.”
What an amazing and interesting view of suffering!
She didn’t cry over the ants. She didn’t say “why me?” Instead she acknowledged that suffering is something that happens to everyone.
No one is immune.
Last year, I went to the zoo with some friends and their children. I was walking with a little boy who was probably two years old at the time. While we were walking, he tripped and fell. He stood up and immediately looked at me as if asking, “Did that hurt? Should I cry?”
He wasn’t bleeding and no arms or legs looked bent in wrong directions, so I mimed brushing myself off and I said to him, “You’re good. Just brush yourself off.”
He copied me and then a moment later was back walking down the path, the fall forgotten.
Isn’t unfortunate that we all must grow up, that we can’t stay children forever?
Life is sometimes a hard and unjust teacher. And at some point we lose the innocence that allows children to move quickly past their pain.
Life experiences train our bodies to respond to stress with a flood of adrenaline that can hijack our brain, beat up our bodies from the inside out and sometimes leave us feeling incapacitated.
We lose weight. We gain weight. We sleep too little. We sleep too much.
We cry. We ache. And time and time again find it virtually impossible to move on.
It’s why I love the sometimes wild and explosive language of the psalms.
Psalm 124:4-5 says, “Then would the waters have overwhelmed us and the torrent gone over us; then would the raging waters have gone right over us.”
How many times has life seemed like a raging flood? How many times have we felt caught up in something beyond our control?
What do we do?
Psalm 122:6 says, “Pray for … peace.”
This past Friday night was a rough one for me as I suddenly realized (metaphorically speaking) that what I thought was a nice leisurely cruise down a quiet river was something else entirely. The current was picking up and I could hear what sounded like the Niagara Falls of all waterfalls just ahead.
All this time, I had thought I had some control over my life, but now I was realizing that I had no control whatsoever and the more I tried to fight for control, the more out of control I felt. I was Peter walking on the water and then losing sight of God. I had made the mistake of thinking I could do things on my own. I had made the mistake of not trusting God even in the stormiest of seas, even in the most raging waters.
Peace followed Saturday morning.
I went out to the church to try something new. That has been the theme of my life these past eighteen months—newness.
And the new thing I was trying—fly fishing.
Nikki was leaving later that day for seminary, but came out to the church to spend some time with and teach a few adventurous souls who wanted to learn how to fly fish.
I have never enjoyed fishing. When I was a child, I thought I might like to fish and so sat out on the dock behind my grandparent’s trailer with a stick and a piece of string, but by the time I was a teenager, I would still go out on the boat with my dad, but I was more likely to be holding a book than a fishing rod.
Fly fishing is as different from regular fishing as cross country skiing is from downhill skiing. Fly fishing requires quite a bit of finesse.
And finesse has never been something I have excelled at. There were moments though, yesterday, when I would snap my wrist back and wait for the line to uncurl behind me before whipping it back out again when I could feel—I didn’t have to guess—I could feel the tug of the line and know that it was ready.
Done correctly, the fishing line will lay out on the water in a perfect straight line. Mine was mostly curly cues when we practiced on land.
But once we got out to the water, Nikki showed me the roll cast where you let the line dip behind you a bit so that the rod and the line form the letter “D” and then you cast the line out a bit side-armed.
Voila! I had it. It would still take me doing the cast twice to get the fly all the way out, but I could do it and there was a certain peace in casting, in the repetition, in the pleasure of seeing the line out on the water where it was supposed to be.
Nikki came over to check on me once and just as she got to me, I felt something crawling on my leg.
I looked down and low and behold I was standing in an ant pile and ants were crawling all over my sneaker and up my leg.
“Oh no,” Nikki said, her voice rising a bit over concern for me.
“It’s okay,” I said and brushed the ants off.
It was my turn in the ant pile.
And no harm done.
