Light On Dark Water

What Did We Do To Deserve This?

I’ve been spending far too much time looking at a computer screen and have developed some fairly severe pain in my neck and shoulders. Since I have to do it all day in my job, I’m going to have to greatly reduce the amount of time I spend on the computer at home. So this will be short. It’s a good opportunity to praise, briefly, the spiderwort (Tradescantia ohiensis).

I’m not much of a gardener or naturalist, and probably cannot reliably identify more than half a dozen or so of the most common flowers, but I know the spiderwort because of the way it greets us in early spring each year. It’s a wild flower that appears, entirely unbidden, around the edges of, and sometimes in, our yard, and in the half-sunny spaces between the woods and the road. There’s something about the gratuitous nature of this visitation that moves me.

The cry of “what did I do to deserve this?” reveals an interesting aspect of human psychology. We believe that happiness is our natural right, and that when something bad happens it is an affront for which we deserve an explanation. We might just as well, though, ask why good things happen. However one might plead his own case, or the case of those he loves, does anyone really believe that the human race as a whole has any very good claim to a reward? I take the spiderwort as a sign of God’s grace, and give thanks that both come undeserved.