A good friend whom I’ve never met (I have a few of those courtesy of the worldwide old tools community…) posted this morning about a successful toilet repair. Trivial? Well, yeah, of course. He knew it, I know it. Everyone who comments on it knows it. So what! Life is not measured by the epic events but rather the daily grind. Even our church year is dominated by “ordinary time”, which isn’t “ordinary” at all in the sense we use the word today but rather more along the lines of the original word which refers to “counting the days”.
I won a little battle of my own last night. For as long as I can remember, I’ve had an ongoing battle with the notion of indoor plumbing. We live in an old house where something always seems to be broken or well on its way to be that way — and way too often it seems to involve running water. And every time something like this happens, I have flashbacks to home where we actually had an old outhouse in the backyard throughout my childhood. Oh, we didn’t actually use it for anything but storing the garden tools, but it was there, a stunning reminder of days gone by.
We recently had some appliances services on the verge of them going out of warranty (okay, there’s another win!!). So, the dishwasher was on this list. The service tech came — 2nd time for this exact same problem in the span of about 6 months. So my befuddlement, they weren’t carrying the part. Huh? Same machine, same symptom and you wouldn’t at least be carrying a very common part just in case it just happened to be the same problem? Anyway, part ordered, part received, part installed and away we go, yes? Well… almost. First run of the beast and water starts spraying into the basement. Eeegads!
So… I pull the thing out (no small trick itself since we had a new floor installed after the machine was in place and it is just higher enough to require quite an effort to extract the dishwasher.) But I digress… I tip it to the side only to now very easily see a hole in the tub. Dandy. Ah, but this time, I win. In spite of vast skepticism on the part of my lovely bride, a $3 tube of epoxy and a patch trimmed from a PVC cap seemed to be just the thing … after letting the epoxy cure overnight, back on goes the water, I fire the beast up and voila, no more drips!! We’re back in business.
Yes, those little battles are the stuff of the good life. Never forget it!!
The past few years when I was teaching second graders in the Christian Formation program the normal pattern was to spend the fall preparing for First (and hopefully not last!!) Reconciliation and then the winter and spring preparing for First Eucharist. It is an exciting year where the material is at the very edge of what the kids are ready to grasp. A few actually seem to get, most go through the motions but it will take another year or two before any of the preparation sinks in. Hopefully, the formation is going on well beyond the classroom.
This year I was asked to step into an older classroom but the curriculum contains a somewhat different view of familiar material, adapted for the minds of kids who have gotten a little taller and lot smarter. Opportunity knocks. We get to talk about stuff with a little meat on the bones and so we get to broach the subject of sins of omission. Oh, it’s easy to pick out the things we do that we ought not be doing. Even in a culture gone haywire with permissiveness, people of good will can largely agree on actions which cross the line.
But somewhere along the line we got lazy. Yes, lazy. I’m sure I was a lazy teenager. Seems to have always gone with the territory to some degree. Here’s the difference. Once upon a time we really did feel accountable for the world around us. We really did feel a need to do something about situations around us that didn’t seem right, didn’t seem fair. Don’t get me wrong, I still see it around me. But it has sadly become a notable exception. When I see young people around me that stand out now, it is with a tinge of regret that I have to wonder when things changed. Remarkable actions today were often just a way of life only a few decades ago. As a culture, as a society, we have largely institutionalized sins of omission. We are instructed in James, chapter 4: “Whoever knows what is right to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.” (RSV). The Old Testament spoke of this as “complacency (Zephaniah). I think those same people of good will I mentioned above can probably agree that complacency crosses a line we ought not cross.
Like so many vices, complacency has a corresponding virtue. So let us open our eyes to the world around us and practice compassion. Parents, look for ways to put your childen in situations where they act with compassion. Young people, I challenge you to look up from that hand held rudeness enablement device and do something about what you see. Little things matter. Little things, done with virtue, set a pattern of behavior that steers us away from vice.
Next week, I’m taking my three oldest children to help serve meals at a shelter for the homeless. A little thing really, but never think that a little thing is of little importance. Many decades ago, I had my first experience with service to those in need. No doubt a little thing. A little thing that was life changing. Find a way today to do those things you can for others.
We eat, breath and sleep soccer around here and when I’m not coaching, I like to be watching. Given my own team schedules, I don’t often get to see my own kids in action, but we’re workin’ on that!
Tonite begins our soccer calendar year with both Teddy and Selena in action at Uihlein Soccer Park. Nat remains sidelined with a cast on the arm while we wait for a compression fracture to heal. Hopefully he will be able to at least return to field play before the indoor season ends but will almost surely be back in goal when the weather warms and young futballers look for green grass.
My own little band of stars adorned in their lime green jerseys returns to action on Saturday. Representing all five of our club’s rec U12 teams, this group, many of whom had never been on indoor turf before, darn near pulled out a win against an experienced all boys team in our first game almost a month ago. Should be a very entertaining winter!!
