OOPSIE

The five-year-old niece of a friend of mine had to be told that her 93-year-old grandfather had died. He lived in another country, had seen him once or twice in her young life and was, thus, not very close to him. But she needed to be told that he had passed away. Her response? It wasn’t, “I’m so sad” or “I will miss him” but simply “Oopsie!”

When I heard the story, I laughed. But the more I thought about it, that was a very profound and probably very deep theological response. So much of life is made up of oops. “Oops, I spilled the milk.” “Oops, I fell and broke my leg.” “Oops, my friend had a stroke.” “Oops, oops, oops.”

In so many ways so much of life happens in the spur of a moment. It is not planned. It is not expected. It is certainly not desired. But it happens. Oops. Now what? For that five-year-old, “Oops, grandpa died. I am sorry, I guess, but my life goes on.” For her mother whose father it was who died, it was still an oops. Her life had to go on as well. Yes, the oops was much more personal; and even if the death was expected, it was still an oops in that it caused an immediate change in her life, just as all oops-moments and events do.

I know this sounds rather flippant and perhaps it is. But the point is that these moments usually come when we are not fully, if that, prepared for them. And even when we are, there is still a moment, or longer, of shock that follows. We can sit by the bed of a dying loved one knowing full well that that person’s life is coming to an end. We are prepared. Yet, when the death comes, it is still somewhat of a shock. A life is gone. Now what?

The same is true for any oops. Whatever that oops was, it has changed our life: the broken leg, the spilled milk, the sudden illness of a friend. Whatever we had planned on doing before we spilled the milk or broke our leg now had to be rethought. We’ll wipe up the milk and move on. Not a very big deal, but a deal nevertheless. We’ll get the leg put into a cast: a bigger deal because now we have to make some changes, perhaps large ones, in the way we live our life until we are healed.

Life would be so much easier if we could prevent an oops from happening, but we cannot. And maybe it’s a good thing that we can’t. We can learn so much about life itself and even more about our own life when we have to deal with those oopses that come our way. Perhaps that’s the most important thing we learn is if we have indeed learned anything from the oops. The truth is, if you are like me, sometimes we don’t.

The milk spilled because we were not paying attention to what we were doing. But did we learn to become more attentive to what we are doing? We broke the leg because we tried to do something foolish. Have we become less foolish? Those oops moments, if nothing else, should become learning moments in our life. Whether they are or not is up to us.