Until this past Friday night, my column for this week was going to be about the management of Type II Diabetes, which I will save for another week, but something happened that I felt would be nice to share. I promise to pontificate about adult onset diabetes and how to stay healthy with it at some other time.
It had been a very busy week, and I was looking forward to getting out into the lake and enjoying some sun and skiing. When it was time to launch the boat, a friend of mine and my little sister excitedly drove off down the road perhaps a little too fast and the right rear tire of the boat trailer went off the side of the road and hit a sharp edge of a hole (Hancock County tax dollars at work – NOT!!). The tire blew out. To make a long story short, we didn’t have a spare for the trailer and had to abandon the boat in the middle of nowhere to go to my grandmother’s house not too far away to borrow one.
We got back with the spare and proceeded to try to figure out just how to change a tire on a boat trailer. By this time it was getting pretty dark, and the weekenders were rolling in by the truckload. They blew past us and offered a breeze in the stifling heat, but no one was in the mood to stop. We did get plenty of hecklers and whistlers but no help. Finally between the three of us we figured out where to put the jack and how to block the trailer wheels. At what seemed like five minutes before complete blackness (no street lights in Hancock County either), a nice man, his wife, a friend, and two very sweet dogs stopped to bail us out. We never got their names, but they were from Macon and offered us frosty beverages in the one hundred degree heat in addition to taking over completely and changing the tire. Thank you to the gang from Macon, and may God bless you richly.
Maybe this account isn’t so extraordinary but the fact that Good Samaritanism is still alive and well in this age of abductions, murders, and meanness is pretty extraordinary to me. Maybe I’m naïve, but I like to think that people are basically good. Lately I have been examining my own life in an effort to balance it, and I have discovered that we get from life just what we expect to get from it. We also get back from life what we give. Although I watched about twenty cars go by without even offering to help us, I knew that somehow we would get out of this predicament unscathed. It didn’t make me angry that nobody stopped because I knew that everything would be all right. It was in the eleventh hour, but we were taken care of. I fully expected either: a) we would figure it all out and get the tire changed without incident, or b) someone would stop and take care of it for us. We went about trying to figure it out rather than doing the “Why me?” dance, and lo and behold the problem was solved.
Maybe it was a test because just a few short years ago I would have been ranting and raving about whose fault this was and how the whole weekend was ruined and how nobody ever wanted to help and blah, blah, blah. As well as I know my name, I know that if the ranting and raving ensued, we would have been there all night with one thing or another going wrong and delaying our purpose. I actually heard myself saying aloud, “What am I supposed to learn from this?” As soon as I gave in to the situation and tried to learn from it, Good Samaritans were sent to solve the problem and let me know that perhaps I had already learned what I needed to learn from this and I had passed my test with flying colors.
The boat got launched at about 9:30pm, and the full moon shone orange as it danced on the glassy waters of Lake Sinclair. As I drove the boat home recounting our adventure in my head, I absorbed the beauty of it all. I am thankful for life’s lessons and for newfound awareness of what it takes to get along happily in our world. If we all expect to see goodness in each other and give what we like to get, more beauty will shine through for everyone. Treat your spirit well.