I will never forget an exchange that I had with my mother many years ago regarding the toilet in our bathroom. It was an exchange that I now feel helped me to slice life into smaller pieces at a very young age and it still reverberates throughout the framework of the faith that I have today.
I can’t recall exactly what the situation was that led to the exchange, but I can still remember how stunned I was at what my mother said. I had made an innocuous comment regarding the fact that our toilet had never been stopped up to the point where my father had to rod it out, or worse, remove it to rod out the drainage pipe.
My mother meekly replied, “We’ve been blessed.” Now, you have to know my mother in order to fully appreciate what I’m trying to describe here (God I love her so much. I have truly been blessed). As she said those words she looked right into my eyes with a sweetness, a simplicity and sincerity that disguised the depth of the point that she was making.
Without this spoon-fed revelation my young mind would have never linked a blessing from God and a toilet together, understanding as I did what went into toilets and what was flushed down toilets.
Yet this was Mama who was telling me this. And I knew how serious she was about God and church, because she dragged me to church every Sunday against my will. But I still looked at her with what I’m sure she recognized as stupefied silence, a look that I’m also sure said, “Now, how you gonna sit there and tell me that God blessed us with a good toilet?”
She met my silent expression with a silent expression of her own, but her’s definitely wasn’t stupefied…
The Muse Minefield 