On Sunday, we will make a major announcement at Virginia-Highland Church. It is one of those wonderful surprises that makes your day and then makes you say, “Yikes! What do we do now?!?”
This may be TMI, but I have a little plastic sperm-shaped key ring in my desk drawer. It was given to me when we learned that we were pregnant with our youngest daughter. It was a euphoric moment because we had been trying to adopt, and, in Texas at that time, that was an uphill slog for lesbian and gay parents. So, we took another route. Then, five weeks after my sperm key ring showed up, so did our oldest daughter. Parkland Hospital, the public hospital in Dallas, called to say, “We have a baby for you. She is three months old.” It was glorious good news that left us saying, “Yikes! What do we do now?!?”
That was almost exactly a quarter of a century ago, and what we did was have the greatest adventure of our lives, rearing two wonderful daughters who are 11 months apart in age but who arrived seven months apart into woefully unprepared lives. Oh, we had been hoping and praying, but no parent is ever fully prepared for how a child, or children, will change them and their lives.
There are other prayers in our lives that are like that. We suddenly get the job we have been after, or the person we’ve been courting says yes to dinner or yes to our marriage proposal, or the contract on our dream house gets accepted … “Yikes! What do we do now?!?” It is said that for every person who knows how to handle good news there are 10 who can cope with bad.
Why is it that we are so unprepared when good things happen? All too often, transformational gifts come into our lives without us even knowing, unless, of course, they are rather shocking, like a baby. I remember being dismissive to a friend about the first date that Bill and I had. I told them that I wasn’t actually sure it was even a date. After 36 years of love, I know now it was the greatest thing to ever happen to me. When he asked me about the date, I should have said, “Yikes! What do I do now?!?”
Blessings,
Rev. Michael Piazza