As a grandmother, you often look back on yesterdays and discover gems that have influenced your thinking and shaped your life. It is often the simple things that have the most impact. It is the seemingly insignificant moments in life that hold the greatest lessons. As a Christian, I believe life is a learning place where lessons and meaning can be found in every situation. We just need to look. I ask often, “What can I learn from this?”
The incident of the shattered glass was one of those times. My son Chad now is 35 and has six children of his own, but when he was 10, he was always creating projects, some of which went awry. He loved people and wanted to make them happy. He still does, but he is a little wiser in his decisions. Back then, he’d snip my beautiful rose blossoms and bring them to me as a present. He had no idea I wanted those roses to stay on the bush for a while. He’d clean the kitchen and toss all the leftovers to the dogs and cats. He didn’t have a clue that the leftovers could be used for another meal.
One day, Chad in his festive service mood decided to decorate for his dad’s birthday. He pulled out year-old streamers and half-burned candles and started to decorate. He cut up the strawberries I was going to use for strawberries and cream and put them on the cake as decorations. Then he put a half-burned candle in each strawberry. He was justly proud of himself.
The party would have been a success if he’d stopped there, but he had to put up the white and yellow crepe paper streamers. He wrapped them around the pillars and started on the banister.
At the time, we had glass panels that framed our open gazebo-shaped basement during the winter to hold in the heat. We removed and stored the glass against the banister during the summer. We had taken the glass down two days before. When Chad came to the banister, he had a decorating problem. He couldn’t loop the streamers around the top rail of the banister without moving the glass. I was working, so he didn’t want to bother me with questions about cause and effect. He simply moved each of the six 10-foot glass panels and leaned them against the kitchen table and continued to decorate.
He finished his project and came to share his success. He sat down beside me just in time to hear a terrible crash. We ran to the kitchen to find mounds of shattered glass. You know the windshield-type glass that leaves thousands of little squares? My kitchen floor and basement were covered with it.
I wanted to give him a Scotch blessing. A Scotch blessing is a long lecture in which the main object is to vent frustration. I bit my tongue as I remembered Chad didn’t break the glass on purpose. He was trying to make his dad’s birthday a happy one. I took a few deep breaths and tried not to think of the $600 the mounds of glass represented. I said with amazing calmness, “Chad, get the dustpan.”
It took about an hour to clean up all the glass. I kept thinking, “What am I going to tell my husband?” His birthday was not going to be a happy one. I planned to greet him with, “There’s been a tragedy, but the kids are all right. Nobody got hurt.” I figured that would slant his perspective in the right direction. I hoped he'd see that life and health is much more important than $600 worth of glass.
Luckily, when my husband arrived it was dark and he didn’t notice the carpet sprinkled with splinters of glass, nor the empty banister. I said, “Honey, Chad had an accident today.” He groaned. I know he was thinking, “Oh no, what now?”
“He was decorating for your birthday," I hurriedly explained. “He wanted to make you happy.” Then I told him about the glass. I know he wanted to give me a Scotch blessing, but he didn’t. The incident was over – except finding significance in the shattered glass. It took another incident for the lesson to sink in.
When we moved to our ranch, the soil didn’t have much growing capacity. It had to be enriched year after year. Now it is a beautiful place with fruit trees and grapevines, but back then we had been trying to grow grapes for years. We planted a new set every year. Finally, one grapevine took off and looked wonderful. I watched it every day. I could name each new leaf and new grape. While I was inspecting the vine, I looked over in the tall grass about a foot away. There was another grapevine starting to grow. I fairly leaped with joy. Now we would have two grapevines for our efforts of the last five years. I went on a mission to save them. I picked up my shovel, and with a firm resolve to give the new grape room to grow, I started chopping. Before I knew it, the grass was gone – and so was the vine. In my effort to chop out the grass, I had chopped the grapevine from its roots.
I was so disappointed, and I knew firsthand how Chad must have felt when his efforts to make someone happy were turned to shambles. It was a good object lesson in compassion, but there was a wider significance. There is something for all Americans to ponder.
We are in the midst of transition from our traditional values that have worked for over 200 years to something we can’t recognize. The issues facing our country are unprecedented. Gender issues, education issues, food shortages, skyrocketing gas prices, foreign threats and talk of the Green New Deal splatter the daily headlines with no end in sight. Some in government theorize that their solution of massive societal changes, leaving God out of the equation, will solve the problem. They are too eager to implement their do-good policies before they have fully assessed the cause and effect. They are winding yellow crepe paper around the banister without considering the cost of the glass leaning against a slippery table. They are too busy eagerly chopping out the grass around a fragile grapevine to realize that gradually and carefully weeding out problems is the best solution.
From my experience, solutions come best when you take into consideration natural laws and study the future under the magnifying glass of the past. Has the solution been tried before? What were the consequences and outcomes? Did socialism, communism or Marxism work in the past? Did any form of government that depends on the equalizing of resources ever work? Our Founding Fathers studied several forms of government before they settled on the Constitution.
If a game is played the same, and the tactics are the same, how can we expect the outcome to be different? Every form of government that depended on forced compliance and equalization finally turned to rebellion and war because men and women were designed to be free to follow the rules set up by the Creator. As seen in history, the arc of the Old Testament is a continual war of rebellion intermingled with moments of peace when people remembered that God grants freedom, not the government. The Greek and Roman empires fell in the midst of economic troubles, morality issues and the destruction of strong family values. Are we following the same path?
We live in the greatest nation on the face of the earth. Even middle-income houses are better equipped than all the kings' palaces of the past. We have more technology and chances to live productive and peaceful lives than any other time in history. We eat more, rest more and entertain more than any other people in any other time or place. Think about it: With all this prosperity, somebody must have done something right.
Perhaps these newfangled ideas of our government could work, but before we start decorating for the birthday party, we need to check and secure the position of the glass before we implement those changes, or we might find our lives in mountains of shattered glass.
