Leaves

We have what they call a “wooded lot.” Real wooded. We’re knee deep in leaves right about now, and just for the record, I ain’t rakin em. I work really, really hard all week, and since my enjoyment of yard work is less than zero, either we’ll hire somebody or we’ll stay knee deep in leaves. I don’t care either way.

But I digress. I was in my bedroom the other day when a whole bunch of leaves fell from the tree right outside the window. Something about the way they looked reminded me of people jumping from a building, so then I thought of the way it seems like a great tragedy when a number of people die all at once… in a natural disaster, or a terrorist attack, or a plane crash or whatever. But really, whether three hundred people die or just one, it doesn’t matter much in the grand scheme of things. Whether one leaf falls or a whole tree full, we were knee deep already.

I thought about that Bible verse that says if God cares about a sparrow falling, you can rest assured he cares about you, too. But I have this tendency to turn Bible verses backwards and look at them another way, so I thought, yeah, that’s about right… people are about as important to the universe as sparrows. I can picture a bunch of people crowded around the deathbed of some loved one bawling “Oh Lord, please save my mama/daddy/husband/wife. We need him/her so much.” But the dying person falls off the tree anyway and joins the umpteen zillion others that have fallen, and nobody really cares but their families.

I have a theory about people who pray not to die and then die anyway. I figure maybe it’s like when children cry and beg for something ridiculous and parents ignore them. I was telling Brandon the other day that we’d like to move from where we live, and he got all worked up about negative aspects he imagined. I tried to tell him that if we moved at all, it would be to a BETTER place, but he can’t imagine it because all he knows is THIS place. Maybe dying’s like that, so God pays you no attention when you whine about it.

Anyway, as I’ve said many times, if something happened to me or any of my coworkers on the way to work one day, the survivors would all be shocked and horrified.We'd weep and moan for a while. But by ten o’clock we’d be thinking about where to go for lunch.

Not real uplifting today, am I? You should really go read Amanda. She’s much cheerier than me. www.nazarativity.blogspot.com.