| Sunny Side Up May 29, 2002 � 2002, Kathleen Gibson Help needed to keep the sunny side up �Just you and me and the wind,� my friend Beverley typed at me, referring to the walk we planned together. �Six-thirty a.m. Let�s meet in front of the school.� Six-thirty? I gulped. I don�t do six-thirty. But I agreed�though not without complaining. �What�s the matter?� she emailed back. �Aren�t you up for a little adventure?� So at six-thirty sharp I waited, shivering, beside the bed of wind-tattered red tulips at the front of the school. No Beverley. The school flag wasn�t even up yet. Sensible flag. I carried on to the corner of my friend�s street and craned my neck to see if she was trudging toward me. Nope. �Well, Miss Shore, the wind and I showed up, but where are you?� I muttered. The breeze snatched my words and hurried off with them. Grumbling about the indecency of winter weather in mid-May, I headed back to the school. Maybe she was coming from another direction. Maybe I�d missed her. But she wasn�t there. I retraced my steps back to her corner. She was nowhere in sight. I walked alone. We figured it out later. Seems she�d left a tad late and charged out her back alley while I was walking away from her towards her corner. When she didn�t find me at the school, she�d kept going in the direction I�d come from. �I am so sorry,� she said, �Let�s try this again.� �Let�s try this again.� It was almost worth our missed walk together to hear that my friend thought I was worthy of another try. I�ve been rather down lately, you see. Weary and feeling a little like a dartboard under life�s careless thrusts. Somewhat lacking that �worthy� stuff that usually enables me to hold my head high and grin at myself in the mirror at the start of each day. Some Christians are never down. Or if they are, they don�t admit it. Life is just �sweeter and sweeter as the days go by�. I�m not one of them. The truth is, my sunny side isn�t consistently up. If there are heavenly exams for serenity, I�ve likely flunked them all. My cup doesn�t always �run over with joy.� Sometimes the �peace that passes understanding� just passes. Period. I can�t always �be still and know� that God is God. I worry and squirm like a worm on a wet sidewalk some days, and I feel pretty bad about it too. So occasionally it�s nice to hear a human voice telling me I�m worth a second try. Later in the day I heard from Beverley again. She told me something else I needed to hear about our respective walks on that miserable May morning. �Oh, well,� she said, revealing her unceasingly positive nature. �We walked alone with the wind� and God.� Of course, God! Had to be him who arranged for my friend to use those particular words to get my sunny side back up. You can respond to this column at [email protected] |
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