Lord Make Me Just a Drop of Oil

An Impression All Right...But, Not the One I Wanted Martha and I hadn’t seen each other in 25 years. She remembered me as the goofball in school who made others laugh during class. I remembered her as a perfect girl, but one who had a low threshold of laughter. I would entertain those around me with various objects hidden just below the table where the teacher couldn’t see. Hey, I was bored. It really wasn’t that funny. They must have been bored also. And, for some reason I will leave to your imagination, my friends were always getting into trouble for laughing. They never reported me as the culprit. Perhaps they were too ashamed to tell that what they laughed at was so trivial. After twenty-five years, a person should forget things, right? Martha didn’t. She called to tell me she and her husband were coming to see us. She recalled the two little plastic dogs I’d carry in my pencil case and the antics they would perform. My youthful pranks still lived on in her memory! But, as I prepared for this visit, I determined to show her that I had grown up, had children and had become a very mature person. During part of our time together, we visited a nearby area that has a lot of Amish shops. One stop was at an older home that had been made into a fabric and novelty store. My daughter and Martha went on ahead of me and were in the downstairs part when I came in. Because Amish do not use electricity, the stairs were pretty dark. It didn’t help any that there was a very dark, heavy set of curtains at the bottom that were designed to keep some of the heat downstairs. In this darkness, I did not see the yellow tape on one of the steps, marking it as more shallow than the rest. I missed that step and went flying through the air. There was no railing and as I flailed in every direction to grab hold of something, the drapes were my only salvation. But they only served as a rope to swing me right out into the room like a monkey. As if that weren’t enough, I landed on a table piled with bolts of fabric. On impact, the bolts flew off the table and I sat there stunned. Worse yet, Martha and Heather were right there, facing my direction, and saw the whole thing. Now, my daughter has grown up with my antics and is often embarrassed by these things. She often says,” Hey, that’s my mom.. She does things like that!” Martha, on the other hand, was immediately out of control with laughter and found the quickest way out of the store. Heather helped me gather up the bolts of fabric and put them back. As for the curtains, there was little I could do to remedy that. Although the rod had not broken, it was in a sharp V shape with the curtains cowering in the middle. We made a small purchase from the Amish girl who couldn’t seem to take her enlarged eyes off of me. When Heather and I got back to the van, we found Martha still sobbing with laughter. Our men, who had been waiting in the van, implored us to give a speedy explanation as to what happened. I lamely said,” Well, I fell and Martha thinks it’s funny.” This remark sent Martha into more gales of laughter. My husband said that Martha had come out and crossed the street weeping so hard that she could hardly walk or talk. As they tried to pump her, asking “Where’s Twila and Heather?” She only sobbed more and couldn’t answer. Seeing her crying so hard, they begin to feel that we had come to some serious harm. Only as they started to get out of the van, my husband thought to ask, “Are they all right?” She managed to squeak out, “They’re okay,” and went on sobbing. It wasn’t until sometime later I got the vision of how that had to look in Martha’s and the Amish girl’s eyes. Everything is peaceful and quiet. Suddenly this woman – a size 18 isn’t really that small – comes swinging in on a curtain and lands on a table of fabric bolts. Yes, had that been someone else, I’d be laughing too. So much for proving I was no longer that high school class clown. This made those antics seem dull. Being an artist, I drew up a cartoon of the act and sent it to Martha some months later. She has kept it in her Bible all these years and told me any time she needs a lift, she takes it out, looks at it, and weeps with laughter all over again. At my expense, I guess she gets a drop of oil now and then that keeps her machinery running smoothly. A drop of oil. Have you ever had times when just a little laughter has help to lighten your load? One such time occurred when our daughter was in college. She had come home one weekend totally devastated. Some unfortunate circumstances had happened and some people she had trusted, proved not to be true friends. She lay across my bed that evening telling me all about it. I reached over and took a book off the night stand and said, “Heather, Lois loaned me this book, saying it might help at times like this. She says it’s really funny!” Heather responded, “Nothing, and I mean nothing, could make me laugh tonight.” I said, “O well, I’ll read some of it anyway,” and commenced to read aloud. I don’t remember the title or the author, but that dear lady had some of the funniest things happen to her. She had bothered to put them into print and now we were relating to some of them. As I read, we were soon slapping the bed and laughing till the tears ran. No, it didn’t change the situation any, didn’t fix any problems, but it did help to lift our spirts. At the time, I said, “Perhaps that’s why so many unusual things have happened to me. I can tell them to someone else and as they laugh at my experiences, it will be a drop of oil in their emotional machinery. All right Lord, I accept who You have made me to be. Maybe that unusual, embarrassing episode will help someone under a load. Possibly some dear lady can find a little humor in those events I clearly didn’t plan. I do accept being a drop of oil for You, Lord. But must I really be the whole can?