This week the theme was painfully evident. My student confidently shared that his mom didn't want to check his folder, morning after morning…while every day he told his mom that I hadn't sent home his folder that day. I was becoming confused. "Ask your mom to check it," I said every morning, as every morning I looked at untouched homework, unsigned folder. "My mom didn't check it today," he'd say. Who knew that a family fight had grounded him from electronics for 2 weeks? He was the boy in the corner with nowhere to run. When the world turned upside down, that red folder was the "override" switch on a plane he couldn't pilot.
I remember being a kid. Back in the day, growing up meant getting to buy all the candy in the store and only giving it to my best friends. It meant eating precisely what I wanted for every meal, only doing the chores that I liked, never hearing Mom tell me what had to be done… When we were "grown up" we would only do the work we liked, only eat what we pleased, and buy what we wanted with all our money.
Funny, growing up never quite shatters that illusion. The illusion of having money that can buy whatever you need…of having time to spend as I please… of always having the best deal, the better bargain, the final word in the matter.
Then the rug is pulled from under your feet. It happens to us all sooner or later: the inevitable confrontation, the sinking moment when we realize there is nothing we can do, and we have no control. We are going where we don't want to go, and there is no option.
Immediately following the conclusion of my Red Folder incident, I found myself in a doctor's office, being prescribed a medicine for a bad cough. 40 minutes and 5 phone calls later, insurance denied coverage and the doctor changed my script to the "approved" medication. And yes, I went on the whole rampage of "this is ridiculous, what are doctors for anyways?" indignant that insurance was telling my doctor what medicine I should have. My sense of justice was violated. I retold my sad tale in righteous anger to numerous indulgent friends and relations.
There it was. The loss of control. For the first time in my life, I went in to a pharmacy to get what I wanted, and was told "no." I was unsatisfied and no one cared. I was no longer the consumer; I was the recipient (who also paid $45). There was the sting. I had trusted that I would be able to negotiate for myself, that I could provide what I needed for myself, that I would always have my better judgment to rely on. For one moment, my better judgment didn't matter.
Misplaced trust is a lost battle, my friends.
"Put not your trust in princes, in the son of man, in whom there is no salvation," in Psalm 146-- "when his breath departs he returns to the earth; on that very day his plans perish."
"Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord his God, who made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them; who keeps faith forever; who executes justice for the oppressed, who gives food to the hungry."
Yep... good thoughts.
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