Something Big and Lovely

It's a peculiar thing that, from time to time, an entire series of events seem to go wrong.  And that's what happened today.  First, the new telephone line for the FAX machine installed last Thursday, seemed to be doing unusual things:  people were trying to connect to the FAX machine, even though nobody had the number yet, and while talking on the other line, you could hear someone dialing out.  A nice young Frontier technician showed up, checked everything, and failed to identify the problem; he said he could only find the problem if he was there while the problem was occurring.

The afternoon went downhill from there.  The power went out for three hours while I was in the middle of a domestic pursuit of some complexity.  The DirecTV satellite kept losing its signal and failed to power up again upon resumption of power.  We discovered a drinking glass was broken.  Then I stubbed my finger on the woodstove, which had been opened up during the power outage (the fire had gone out, of course).   And when I went to pull the chain on the light in the sunroom closet, it jammed and would not operate.  At that point I just stood there and laughed.  Could anything else go wrong?  Martha, who has been having trouble with her computer anyway, told me to stay out of her room for fear I would somehow infect it with the cloud of mishaps gathered around me.

Lee Bowman, our preacher, recounted in a recent sermon a story by Anne Lamott in her book Traveling Mercies about a woman named Carolyn Myss, a world-renowned lecturer on healing:

"Myss had flown to Russia several years ago to give some lectures, and everything that could go wrong did—flights were canceled, overbooked, connections missed, her reserved room at the hotel given to someone else. In all of this she tried to be a good sport, but finally, as she was traveling by train to her conference on healing, she broke down and began to vent to the man sitting next to her about how infuriating her journey had been thus far.  It turned out that this man not only worked for the Dalai Lama but knew him very well.  He responded to Myss in gentle tones, as he gave her an extraordinary insight. We believe, he said, that when a lot of things start going wrong all at once, it is to protect something big and lovely that is trying to get itself born.”

What could that something big and lovely thing be that is being protected?