Coming back from lunch on the Eldorado blacktop, nice day outside, windows rolled down because my air’s not working, left elbow resting on the driver’s side door and my hand’s hanging out, when the next thing I know a bug has splattered his guts all over my finger. Yuck.
That’s never happened to me before. The windshield always seemed to catch them pretty well, but not this time. I have no idea what kind of flying bug it was, but it left a nasty yellow stain.
So I reach for some Wet Ones Antibacterial Hand Wipes which we have in our car. When you have young kids you learn to carry Wet Ones because, well, you never know. I didn’t really want to wait until I returned to Ridgway to wipe what used to be a bug off of my hand.
This happened to be a new container. I’m talking about the plastic cylinder containers with the red flip-tops, where the wipes are wrapped around each other and they’re meant to feed through the double-slit opening, then you can tear them off one at a time. Well, new containers do not come with the wipes already fed through the opening. So I had to take the lid all the way off and try to find the origin of that first wipe somewhere in the middle of the wrap.
I’m driving down the blacktop at highway speed, mind you, and let’s just say it’s handy to drive a small car where you can steer with your knees. I remember learning that trick from my dad a long time ago when he used to try to scare us kids by taking his hands off the wheel while driving. It definitely takes two hands to get that first wipe out of the container.
All right, so far so good. Hand is wiped, finger is bug-guts free, and I’m motoring on down the road. Thought then that I should go ahead and try to feed the next wipe through the double-slit opening so that it would be easier to access next time I need it. There really ought to be some instructions on the proper way to do that. Usually, of course, it’s my wife who handles those kinds of things, and I’ll know next time to let her keep that job.
I took the next hand wipe and with my left thumb tried to push it through the opening. By the way, that opening is really tight. Well, I couldn’t get enough of the wipe through to grasp it with my right hand and pull it on through. So I pushed it harder with my thumb, but instead of just the wipe getting fed through, the tip of my left thumb came through as well, and got stuck!
I mean, stuck! The four corners of the plastic gripped my thumb and I could not pull it back out. Did I mention how sharp those corners are? I felt that if I tried to pull it out I would inflict serious damage to my thumb. Kind of like trying to extract a prey fish from a piranha’s mouth.
I really didn’t know what to do. I guess I could have pulled over and tried to work it loose, but I thought I could handle the pain for a few more minutes until I got home. So I drove halfway back to Ridgway with a Wet Ones Antibacterial Hand Wipes container clamped to my thumb. If you met me on the road that day and I didn’t wave, you now know why.
When I got home it took a couple of minutes, but I was able to free my thumb from the pinchers without major injury. Just a sore thumb with three fresh indentions (the fourth corner was on my nail), and a bit of a bruised ego. Some experiences in life are quite humbling.
Like when we recognize that we’re truly undeserving people when it comes to God’s grace. In light of how good and holy and righteous and just God is, who am I to think that somehow I have earned or deserve anything. Not a single blessing, not a single promise from His Word, not a single act of His mercy. Nothing. That’s what I deserve. No, not nothing, but in fact something much worse – death and hell.
My prayer rises with the penitent tax collector, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner” (Luke 18:13).
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