Adam and Eve were happy in their garden until something happened, one thing, and in that moment, everything changed about their lives. In some theologies, it changed things in all the other lives to come after them.
Robert Frost’s poem “Out, Out“ tells of a boy sawing wood on a fine Vermont evening, only to have the saw jump and cut off his hand and end his life. As his blood drained out “the watcher at his pulse took fright.” And then he was gone.
Things can change, for better or for worse, in small moments of time. She opens an envelope and reads one single line. A doctor walks into the room and speaks a single sentence. Two roads diverge in a wood, and despite the uncertainty and hesitation, the one taken makes all the difference.
And things can even change in our minds and thoughts as we anticipate and face such decisive moments. It becomes as if what might take place has taken place.
This happened to me on an unsuspecting day in downtown Waynesboro, Pennsylvania. I’d stopped at an intersection and waiting for the light to change I saw something that made me instantly happy.
A young boy, a boy of nine or ten years, a boy like I was once and still have the memory of, this boy was riding his scooter on the sidewalk.
His head was up, his kick was strong, his face glowed with the pleasure of adventure. I guessed his scooter was new and was the best thing that had ever happened to him. I remembered my first bicycle from the Western Auto Store in Maryville, Tennessee, as a boy about that age, and how I loved and treasured that bicycle.
When I first got it, my parents told me where I could ride and where I should not. I must not cross Court Street, they said. But I soon dared to cross Court Street anyway. And a car hit me and knocked me over into a ditch. My cut knee required many stitches. But as soon as the knee healed, I was back on the bicycle. I am still on bicycles. I know how the scooter kid was feeling.
But my moments with those feelings were not to last.
I noticed the boy’s features—Latino, I thought. And dark, disturbing thoughts came upon me then. I knew the boy may have been born here in Waynesboro, but his parents likely were not. His parents could be ICE deportation targets and the boy with them.
I pictured this boy grabbed helpless and held by masked agents armed for military combat. I pictured him separated from his parents and shipped far away to a detention facility. I pictured his fright and pain and confusion. I could see his face there, so different from the one on his scooter this calm and sunny day.
And then arose a sight of his scooter lying somewhere abandoned beside the road.
My world turned to anger. Anger as I thought about the leaders who plan and organize these things while claiming the Christian religion as their own and calling the country a “Christian nation.”
I thought how strange to associate all this with Jesus of Nazareth. He “went about doing good” the Bible says. Good like feeding the hungry, healing sick people, protecting children, and befriending outcasts such as lepers, prostitutes, and foreigners.
Then I drove on, feeling rather helpless about it all.
