Job

We read in the Bible about the plagues that descended upon different folks as if they were some rare and distant exotic diseases that no longer exist today.  And I am sure they are there as a way of helping regular people understand that bad things happen to good people, a way of explaining the unexplainable.

In the end, though, the fact that they happen seems less important than how people survive them.

In the seventies I might have gone out and beat a pillow with a baseball bat to “work out my frustrations.”  In the nineties I might have tried to rephrase them into positive statements about how I would fix them.

Expressing my feelings is good, but a better solution might be to examine the way I feel them.

Anger and frustration seem to be a natural response to such things, especially when they pile up, one on top of the other, but those things really don’t help in the long run, at least not for me.

Anger and frustration are like that little engine who could.  They build up and build up and build up until I am a huffing, puffing, steaming little bundle of power.  I think I’m mad.  I think I’m mad. I think I’m mad.  Until I am truly madder than a March hare.

I have a friend who sent me the following via his phone late one night:

car...dead.
Internet...down.
Ac broke in house today.
Now no water.

Boils will surely be next.

It seems to me that humor is much more beneficial than punching the pillow at relieving the tension of this moment.

And it surely stuck with me!  I couldn’t stop thinking about what he’d said.