Perhaps I should have said "Saturday Contusion"

Pondering coincidence was interesting last week.

I may have stumbled onto my own painful parable Saturday afternoon after I left the coffee and sofa behind and went out into the sunshine. I had been reviewing a court file for this week, but the sun came out and it just seemed sinful not to get out into it.

My yard is a disaster. Over near the tree line there are beautiful blooming azaleas, redbud and dogwood trees and wisteria. They surround what was formerly a small patio under two sweetgum trees. The weeds and undergrowth have taken it over, and the sweetgums are dead, having shed limbs onto the old patio. It looked like a good project to start on.

First I carried the old limbs and dumped them in the woods. As I got to the limbs at the bottom of the pile it was hard to pick them up because the wisteria vines had wrapped them up. I bent down and begin to pull the wisteria vines. They were stubborn, so I pulled harder, taking the traditonal tug o war stance and pulling and grunting . . .

I don't know what happened right after that. It felt like a truck hit my left temple and cheekbone. Everthing went red for a few seconds, and when my vision returned I looked at the ground, where eight feet of sweetgum log lay broken in pieces at my feet. I couldn't feel anything from the neck up for a moment, which, as scary as that may have been, was preferable to the pain that replaced it.

I lifted my hands to my face to see if it was still there. It was, but it seemed out of place. As feeling returned I realized my teeth were chipped. My jaw was out of alignment, and lumps were rising on my cheek and temple. Then I looked at my hands. They were full of blood.

As I am prone to do in situations like this I thought, "this is an embarassing way to go out. They'll find me dead here, and from now on they'll just shake their heads and lament how I died pulling wisteria vines." I heard voices of friends who would have reminded me to be careful had they been watching.

But I was still standing, and hurting badly, so I wasn't dead yet. I looked up and noticed that the top of the sweetgum tree was a lot shorter than it had been. As it turns out, it was now at my feet in pieces, broken either by my head or the ground or both.

I checked to see if anyone had seen the incident, then stumbled into the house and cleaned up the mess formerly known as my head. Then I returned to the sofa. The bleeding and oozing stopped a few hours later.

I didn't know the wisteria vine with which I battled was connected to the top of that rotten sweet gum tree. As far as I could tell the vine ran along the ground, underneath some of the limbs I had yet removed. But it didn't matter whether I saw the connection or not. It was connected. Believe me.

Sometimes that is the way life is. We tug and pull on something. We wrestle with it, change it, move it, as if it were connected to nothing else. And then we are shocked when a random tree falls on our heads.

I still believe that some coincidences are created by God. But sometimes we are just totally unaware of how connected we, and all of creation, are. So we just tug away, willy-nilly, only to be shocked by the results that we never anticipated.

The bright side is I looked really mean for court today with a deep cut on my left cheekbone.

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