The Divine Spark

You’re in your mid 50’s, married for over 35 years to a good man. You have grown children and several beautiful grandchildren. Life is good. Then one day you’re shopping at Walmart when your cell phone rings. You glance at it and don’t recognize the caller. Probably one of those robo-calls trying to sell you an extended warranty on a car you no longer even own, but you answer it anyway. The man on the other end of the line identifies himself as a Virginia State Trooper. Instantly your mind fills with a thousand nightmares. Someone’s been in an accident or worse. You brace yourself for his next words, but nothing can prepare you for what you hear…that your husband has collapsed at work and that the State Trooper needs to speak to you in person, face to face, as soon as possible. Everything else is a blur. There, in the middle of Walmart surrounded by strangers, you collapse under the crushing weight of the news.

But, we go nowhere by accident. At this point, with everything crashing down, you are approached by two strangers, a couple who look to be in their early 40’s. The woman speaks, “Ma’am, what’s wrong dear? Are you alright?”

You don’t remember exactly what you said in response, but it was conveyed with terrible anguish, “My husband is dead!!”

Then the strangers take over. They take you to somewhere you can sit down. The woman puts her arms around you and holds on tight. Your son is notified and he is on the way to pick you up. The kind woman tells you, “I will stay right here with you until your son arrives, ok?” And she does. She and her husband stay there doing their best to comfort you.

The rest of the day proves to be the worst of your life. You soon start having chest pains of your own and wind up in the emergency room. “Broken heart syndrome,” the doctor calls it. You stay overnight for tests. Your children gather around you. Things have to be done. There’s the funeral home arrangements. You just can’t. You’re not able, so your grown children take over. You are left in the grip of unimaginable grief. Your happy life has been turned upside down. With all the doctors and nurses and family buzzing around you and your heart broken over such monumental grief…you think of that couple at Walmart, you whisper a prayer for their kindness and compassion. You are so thankful that they took the time to stop whatever they were doing to stay with you during those first terrifying moments when you were at your worst. What would you have done without them?

This is not fiction. This isn’t the opening sequence of some new story I’m writing. This actually happened to a friend of mine a couple of days ago. It shouldn’t matter and it doesn’t matter, but since this is 2021 I feel compelled to mention that the couple who came to my friend’s aid in that Walmart were African-American. 

We live in a time of great racial tension and unrest. Every encounter between people from different races seems fraught with peril. The only stories we see in the media are bad ones. But the story I just shared and ones just like it that happen every day across this country don’t end up on the nightly news. My friend, a white woman in deep pain, gets approached by an African American couple who see her pain and can only think to stop whatever they were doing to come along side a total stranger, a fellow human being in great distress, to offer kindness, support and grace at the hour of her greatest need. They did so anonymously. They will get no credit for it, no accolades will come their way. But this story and it’s telling in this space hopefully will serve as a reminder that all of us has within us a spark of the divine, the better angles of our character which so often rise to the occasion. For my friend, it was strangers at Walmart who showered upon her their love and concern, offering the one single ray of light in a day of profound darkness.

Who will you be a ray of light to today?