Back in the saddle again.
Gene Autrey?

August 1 I was in Billings, Montana staying with some relatives when I heard the news. A bridge had collapsed along interstate 35W in Minneapolis, near the University of Minnesota and the Mississippi River. At first I thought it was the University Avenue overpass, but then we turned the television on and discovered that the main bridge over the Mississippi had crumbled. Cars were in the river, people were scrambling to help. A school bus could clearly be seen as cameras focused on the bridge – a bridge which only moments before stood high above the mighty Mississippi was now floating in it. Beneath part of the fallen structure a train was also crushed.

I was stunned. I have been on that bridge dozens of times and was planning on being on it again in about a week’s time. When things like this occur we want to know why. Investigations will be undertaken, fingers will be pointed. There will be some greater understanding of why it happened – technically, scientifically. We may even gain some insight into why it happened from a more social perspective. Were there misjudgments made? Have we invested too little in our infrastructure? Have too many of us become so allergic to taxes and government that we forget that tax dollars pay to keep bridges standing. Not every bridge is headed for some sparsely populated island in Alaska. We may gain some more insight into that part of the “why?” and maybe when fingers get pointed we will have to point some in our own direction.

There is yet another dimension of the “why?” question. We might write it “WHY?” Why do such things happen at all? Why did some live and some die in this tragic accident? Did someone, or Someone, choose this, or allow this? I have good friends, people of deep Christian faith who I respect, who would say that God, if God did not plan this, God allowed it to happen for reasons fathomable to God alone. While such WHY? questions may never be answered definitively, I beg to differ. I don’t know why some things happen, why most walked away from the Mississippi river that day, but some did not, and why it was certain people who did not. Things happen and I don’t think God orchestrates of allows every tragedy that occurs in our lives.

On our way to Billings, we drove through wild fires that had been springing up in western Montana. The ground was extremely dry and lightening ignited fires that raged out of control. We spotted one on a hillside along Interstate 90 (kind of a sad week for interstates I guess) that was threatening some homes. We know why the fires are burning – it is dry and lightening stuck, but perhaps not WHY? On a much, much less significant scale, on July 28 I was sitting outside a bookstore in Kalispell, Montana when I received a call from my mother. She had been at our house and found that the refrigerator we had repaired three days before we left town for Montana did not stay repaired. It had quit working completely! If felt for a few moments like the older woman who was walking past, doing a mall fitness walk, had slugged me in the stomach, knocking the wind right out of me. Aren’t vacations fun!

Things happen. We can and should do all we can to prevent tragedies – take better care of our infrastructure, fight fires with the best of our skill and courage. Even when we do our best, tragedies will happen. In the end, we might find that unfortunately we did about what we could to I-35W, and still it fell that day into the Mississippi – who can say. Things happen, and sometimes there is no good reason why.

In the face of this, three things seem to make a lot of sense. We should learn what we can from all of our experiences. While I don’t believe everything happens for a specific reason, I believe we can learn from most everything that happens, and grow from most of our experiences. I was not terribly thrilled to think about our now melting ice cream or our warm butter or sour milk on July 28. But we had a wedding to attend that afternoon, and there would be a celebration with food and dancing – and we were in the beautiful mountains of Montana and had some more days to spend there. I could let our defrosted refrigerator freeze me up, or I could finally tell myself that sometimes things happen and there is not much that can be done and isn’t it a shame to let dancing and mountains be lost in a fog of anxiety. And hopefully we will learn how to build better interstate bridges and how to care for them more adequately.

We should be compassionate, always compassionate. Large tragedies often bring in their wake enlarged hearts – students and neighbors rushing to the scene of the bridge collapse to offer aid, a golfer in the Twin Cities donating $10,000 of his winnings to the bridge relief effort. But we need not wait for tragedy to be kind and caring and compassionate. The truth about life is that it will end for all of us sometime – for most of us we will quietly breath our last, for some we may find ourselves plunging head long from a bridge. Life will end, and wouldn’t it be better if the last thing you said to your friends, your spouse, your children, your co-worker was something kind and compassionate – or the last thing you did for them was gentle and caring. And for hurting families, there is nothing greater we can offer than our caring and compassion.

Finally, we should cherish life’s good gifts and take fewer things for granted. I have been over that bridge dozens of times, and never really gave it much thought. I thought about every bridge on every highway I drove back home from Montana. There are so many things on which we depend, so many things which enrich our lives in some small way, and we take so much for granted. Our culture seems much more concerned with gratification than with gratitude. We are told that we exist to gratify our needs, and then advertising lets us know we have a lot more needs than we ever imagined. We should take more time to say, “thanks” for life’s simple gifts.

Where I find God in the midst of tragedy is not on the “cause” side of things, but in the “response” side. God reminds me to learn and grow. God encourages me to be kind and compassionate. God nudges me toward gratitude.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David