I should be sleeping, but I find myself here again at midnight enjoying the after taste of my coffee from a land far away. Times like this are vital to my existence. I lean back, close my eyes, and listen to the silence. Tonight I’m reflecting back on some of the clumsy things my best friend did back when we were younger. I wasn’t a witness to his hot tub fail, but the story goes like this...
On a senior trip to to the beach, he and his cohorts checked out the hot tub area at their fancy condo. To their delight, it was full of other party animals who were there to live it up for a week.
“Do y’all mind if we join you?” Ben asked as he probably flexed his pectoral muscles. He had a way of doing that without even realizing it.
“Come on in!” the single ladies replied.
With a full display of machismo, he climbed to the top edge of the hot tub. Being careful not to slip, he placed his foot onto the step just under the surface of the water. The problem he ran into at that point was...there was no step. He had just placed all two hundred forty pounds onto a step that did not exist. SPLASH! He instantly found himself submerged in a tangle of a dozen unknown legs and feet. I can only imagine the uproar that followed.
There was another hilarious incident. He was at home when he tripped over one of his nephew’s toys. Stumbling and bouncing off the furniture, he spun around backwards and violently crashed through his living room window. He managed to keep from falling completely out of the house by grabbing the window frames at the sides. So, in essence he crashed his butt through the living room window. Things like this were so normal, he thought nothing of it!
I had a large group of friends over one night. He and some others scaled the rafters through my attic to see a “Barbie” Corvette. It was hidden up there for my niece’s Christmas present. Somehow, everyone made it back down without a hitch...except Ben. There were at least a dozen people in my living room when his elephant skin cowboy boot crashed through the ceiling! Drywall chunks, dust, and insulation bits dropped from the ceiling like baby meteors. His leg dangled there for a second and then slowly retracted. When he came down, he had that “Did anyone notice?” look on his face.
His clumsiness was a very endearing quality to me. We all have personality traits or quirks that are part of who we are. These things are no accident. King David wrote: “You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body and knit me together in my mother’s womb. Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex! Your workmanship is marvelous—how well I know it. You watched me as I was being formed in utter seclusion, as I was woven together in the dark of the womb. You saw me before I was born. Every day of my life was recorded in your book. Every moment was laid out before a single day had passed. How precious are your thoughts about me, O God. They can’t be numbered!” [Psalm 119: 13-17].
We are all “Fearfully and wonderfully made” for a specific purpose. If we are witty, reclusive, bold, strong, athletic, etc... it is not by accident. God knew the type of person He wanted each of us to be. “Qualities” that we sometimes view as flaws are what enable us to impact certain people like no one else can. Even as you read this, God is using Ben’s clumsiness to have an effect on you. He made my life better by reminding me not to take myself so seriously and giving me memories to share with others. We know he could heap trouble on himself and find a way to wreck, get stuck, blow up, or bust anything in sight....and then laugh about it. The question is; what about you?
No comments:
Post a Comment