In one of my favorite episodes of The Simpsons, Homer and Marge are declared unfit parents and Bart, Lisa and Maggie are put into foster care and placed with the Flanders family next door. The Flanders are devout Christians and when they find out that the children haven’t been baptized, they grab their baptizing kit and head out to the river.
Meanwhile Homer and Marge take a parenting course, get themselves declared fit and race back home to be reunited with their children. But when they go to the Flanders house, they find the house empty and a sign on the door that says “Gone Baptizin’.”
Out at the river, the Flanders have the children in the water. Ned Flanders is about to baptize Bart, when Homer emerges from the trees, throws himself into the river and dives for Bart just as Ned begins to pour the water over Bart's head. The water hits Homer instead. Baptism averted.
Both Lisa and Bart run to Homer and embrace him ... and embrace what seems to be a rather anti-Christian message.
Except that Maggie, the youngest Simpson child does not run back to her father. Maggie, just a baby, looks at her father and siblings and sees them sitting in the mud, dirty and grimy. Frogs are croaking and jumping around them. And then she looks at Ned and Maude Flanders and sees them bathed in bright sunlight. They are heavenly and divine. In the days she has lived with them, they have shown her love and kindness, tucking her in bed at night. So when it comes time for Maggie to choose, she chooses the Flanders family.
She turns to go to them, but at that very moment Marge, her mother, appears at the river. Maggie sees her mother and she doesn't even have to think about it. She goes to her mother, who lifts her up and holds her.
I can’t tell you how many times these past few years, I have looked at one part of my life and seen the Simpsons, grimy and uncouth and looked at another part and seen the Flanders family, full of light and love. For example, every Tuesday night I go to seminary to take a class that is all about the call. I leave there feeling spiritually full and filled with goodwill and love. And then I wake up Wednesday morning and know I have to go to work, a place that seems to take more often than it gives. And it makes me bitter.
But in The Simpsons, Maggie reminds me that there is love and wonder and fulfillment even in the parts of our lives that seem less than perfect.
Yesterday God gave me an opportunity to see those things in a spontaneous prayer with a coworker, in a spontaneous hug from the two-year-old son of a friend, in the spontaneous suggestion of a student that we play a real life game of Angry Birds instead of doing our assignment. There is joy and love even in places that sometimes drain the life out of us.
We may want to live on the mountaintops, but perhaps our best work is done in the valleys.
