Seeing Rightly: What I Learned from my Cleaning Lady Today
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Might I ask you to pray for someone our family loves dearly?
Today was “Beata Day.” The day, every two weeks, that we all
look forward to because we know that our dear Beata will come clean us up and
put us all back together again.
Yes, I have a cleaning lady, but she’s much more than that
to me. She’s a friend who has closely watched my kids grow up, patiently
putting their shoes away when I’ve told them a hundred times that Beata’s
coming and they need to put them away. She’s the one who knows where I keep the
old rags—in a tattered cardboard box on a rickety gray shelf back in a corner
of the basement. She’s the one who knows pretty much all about us and doesn’t
judge. (I love her for that.)
Over the years she has shared bits and pieces of her life
with me in her broken English. How she left her home country many years ago in
order to come here, work hard, and make a better life for her family. How she
waited four years for her husband to get a green card to come here too. How she
left her teenage daughters (I can’t begin to imagine how painful that must have
been!), now grown up and married and having babies of their own. How she has
missed out on birthdays and weddings and births.
On Sunday, Beata’s parents flew to Chicago from their
homeland to visit their daughter and son-in-law—what was supposed to be a fun
two weeks. But while still in line for Passport Control in the airport (three
hours, Beata said, with no water), her father collapsed and suffered a heart
attack. He was rushed to the hospital where he died two days later.
And just two days after that, Beata came here—to work! (I
sent her home.)
But we talked for a while before she left this morning,
tears occasionally sliding down her cheeks, and you know what she told me? She
told me about the plans her parents had for her and her husband. How her
parents lived in a really big house, and how their dream was for Beata and her
husband to return home in a few years to live with them. She told me that her
parents had been married for 48 years and were already planning a trip for
their 50th wedding anniversary. A trip that will never be taken. She
told me that it had been seven years—seven years!—since she had seen her
father.
I kept nodding my head, holding her hand, telling her how
very sorry I was that this happened to her.
Then she told me something that I won’t soon forget: she
said, “But I got to see my father.”
You see, rather than focus on all the bad that has happened
to her in the past few days (oh, heck, the past few years), she chose to focus
on the good: the fact that she got to SEE her father in his last few hours. She
got to hold his hand (“He squeezed my hand so tight,” she told me) as his
strength left him in the hospital. And although he couldn’t speak to her, his
eyes fluttered open every now and then and she knew without a doubt that he saw
her.
“I got to see my
father.”
Tragedy has struck my friend—real tragedy. Not the kind of
thing we think of as our everyday tragedy: our car broke down or my kid’s
Homecoming dress didn’t get delivered in time or the grocery store was out of
the specific kind of pasta I was looking for. We get frustrated, upset even,
when the slightest little bit of our life doesn’t go as planned.
I think they call those First World Problems. They’re all
around us.
And they drive us crazy and make us think we’re justified to
get frustrated and upset. (We’re not, just in case you were wondering.) We act
like our lives should be so easy—that we deserve
easy. (We don’t, by the way.) And that these “problems” threaten our very sense
of peace and security. (Ask a Christian living in the Middle East about peace
and security.)
And when these little irritations happen, we complain. Loud
and hard, boy do we complain. We let everyone around us know how bad we have it—so
much worse than our neighbor down the street.
Can I tell you something? I get tired of the complaining. I
just don’t want to hear about it until you have something worth complaining
about.
Like how your father, whom you haven’t seen for seven years,
traveled halfway around the world and collapsed before you even get to give
him a hug.
That you could complain about.
But you see, the irony of this world seems to be, to me,
that the people who deserve to complain never do.
They just look at the tiny bit of good in their bucketload
of bad.
“I got to see my
father.”
*****
