Apocalypse
It only takes one slow-walking person in the grocery store to destroy the illusion that I’m a nice person.
Yes, I am that person who seems one way but can be quite another way underneath the surface. As much as I would prefer to deny it, this quote does indeed point out to me that for all my kind exterior and my gentle and compassionate interactions with people, just below what you see, I’m nothing but a sinner, ready to burst into annoyance and frustration.
People who perpetually smile all the time leave me squinting my eyes with suspicion and worrying a tiny bit about their mental well-being. Don’t we all have pet peeves that push our reactions to an average, ordinary situation immediately to a place where we recognize within ourselves our own capacity to go off the rails? Or maybe it’s just me. I sometimes find myself ranting and raving and feeling inner turmoil and agitation as only an Enneagram personality could do, perhaps, and I try to take a deep breath and just be less bothered. (Good luck with that…)
Tish Harrison Warren shares a situation in her life where she finds herself spiraling quickly, and within her narrative, I quickly and instantly recognized myself. Do you want to go there with me for a minute? Think about the last time that you misplaced your car keys. I’m sure there are readers who literally never do this, but the rest of you, come with me and think through your reactions. Those of you who never do, just a generous note to you: you are the person that we all wish that we could be. I mentioned my dad and his pearls of wisdom bouncing around in my brain in an earlier post; here’s another one of Dad’s: “A place for everything, and everything in its place”. Those of you who have achieved this level of existence, you awe the rest of us. My dad never loses his keys.
But, for the remainder of us, we’re thinking through our feelings and our thoughts in this stressful situation. Obviously, if we need our keys,we must have somewhere to go or something to get out of our vehicle, and oftentimes this is under time constraints. I could be late for work… or the kids will miss the bell at school announcing classes have begun… or maybe we’ll anger our carpool buddy by being late AGAIN…maybe the plane will even leave without us. But we absolutely NEED to find those keys!
Warren shares her stages of “Searching for Lost Objects” - 1) Logic, 2) Self-condemnation, 3) Vexation, 4) Desperation, 5) Last-ditch, 6) Despair. As I read through her comedic articulation of someone’s thoughts progressing through these stages, I saw myself in every single one of them, including her “mild theological crisis over a two-inch piece of metal” (51), and I was laughing out loud as it was so very relatable to me. Were any of her stages the words that came to your mind when you imagined being without your keys?
At the end of this brilliant way to immediately bring us to an awareness of the ease of our departure from our equilibrium, she really nails it by pointing out that losing our keys is the apocalypse - - an unveiling or uncovering. “In my anger, grumbling, self-beating, cursing, doubt, and despair, I glimpsed for a few minutes, how tightly I cling to control and how little control I actually have. And in the absence of control, feeling stuck and stressed, those parts of me that I prefer to keep hidden were momentarily unveiled” (52). There I was, in that moment as I looked up from my book, again, mentally and silently gritting my teeth while stuck behind that slowpoke at the grocery store.
Time and time again, many of us come back to this place: to this sudden awareness of our tendencies to try to grab control. I remember someone explaining to me one time (it may have been C.S. Lewis in one of his books even…or perhaps my mom as my mother’s wisdom is often on the same level in my memory with his) that Satan’s fall from Heaven had everything to do with his four words: “I will not serve”. That idea struck me and stuck with me in thinking about every single one of us and what you can boil our separation from God down to in one simple idea.
He is God. I am not.
That ought to be something I repeat to myself in the valleys of life, in the uncertain times of wondering, in the challenges I face. Or maybe just every single day of my life. When I wake up in the morning, I should let that truth reverberate through me and embrace its beauty, simplicity, and truth: He is God. I am not.
He knows best, and maybe he intentionally planted that lackadaisical shopper in front of me at the store to remind me to slow down, to let go, and to unclench my fists for a few moments. On that note, I really ought to head out to the store; let’s hope that my keys are where I left them and that I don’t find myself driving behind someone going five under the speed limit on the way there.