I was on a cleaning binge recently. I had started early in the morning and the more I cleaned the better I felt. I can be really losing it emotionally and sometimes the fastest cure is cleaning the bathrooms and mopping the kitchen floor. So I was cleaning and couldn't stop, even though Ruben and I had planned to run some errands. Just a little more, I kept telling him.
Finally, we left on our errands and at our first stop, I caught sight of an old friend across the store. We had been friends over a decade before and had drifted apart, our lives going in very different directions. We hadn't talked in years. Besides that, she had been struggling in her marriage back then and I had tried to encourage her in it, but it had been me that ended up divorced, and I had never known what she thought of me after that. I wasn't sure I wanted to find out now and so I hid in the canned vegetable aisle.
But a few minutes later, I came around a corner and nearly ran into her and when I said her name, she looked up and seemed genuinely glad to see me. After exchanging brief generic greetings, I found out that she lived overseas now and that she was actually flying back the next day and only happened to be in the store looking for some last minute items before she finished packing for the flight. I asked her how she was...how are you really, I asked. She looked back at me as if to see if I really meant it and then the tears filled her eyes and she began to pour it out. I stood there feeling like I was on holy ground...be quiet, I thought, this is grief and great hardship. She described the barreness in her marriage, that she didn't think she could last more than a few more months, she spoke of the tremendous difficulties of her day-to-day life in another country and culture. She told me she was a failure.
Whatever I have imagined that people have thought of me because of my divorce, one thing I discovered that I had not anticipated was that there was a great mercy...even for me. I touched my friend's arm and told her that I had worried about what she thought of me because my marriage failed, that I felt like a failure too, but that I had discovered that there is a great, great mercy for those of us who fail. There is mercy for you, too, I told her. Lots and lots of mercy to make up for all the failures and sorrows and grief. She asked me if I would pray for her whenever she came to mind. She asked me to remember her email address and if I ever felt prompted to write her, it would be greatly appreciated she said. I knew she had to go, she had a trip to pack for and a plane to catch. So we hugged and said good bye and she was gone.
As we drove away, I told Ruben what had happened while I stood in the canned vegetable aisle. I told him that it seemed to me to be a divine encounter. There was a reason why I was driven to keep cleaning and cleaning this morning. There was a ten-minute window in time when two lives living on two different continents would bump into each other in a store and an appointment was being orchestrated, an appointment where failures could be spoken out and mercy shared to cover them. May God bless my friend, wherever she is right now.
