FOR many years visitors coming home would stare at a corner of the entrance, where they saw an old-fashioned umbrella with a handle looking quite guilty as it faced downwards, twisted and out of shape, “Twisted umbrella handle!” I tell the curious lookers, and grin.
It was a bit of a nasty fall I had that morning, a few years ago. It had been raining all night and yet I decided to go for my morning walk, and so with my umbrella firmly in hand I entered the wet deserted park and started at a brisk pace. I looked up and saw raindrops nestling on evergreen leaves but did not care to notice they had also snuggled in with the mud below and the next moment found myself flying in the air!
It was quite a fall and as I struggled to pick myself up from the slippery muck, I wondered what I had broken and was happy that except for a bruised elbow and slightly twisted hip was none the worse for wear! “Why?” I asked aloud, “had I been allowed to fall? Wasn’t there a God above who was supposed to look after me?”
It was then I noticed my umbrella handle. The thick steel had bent to a full right angle! It looked quite out of shape, and I realized with horror the handle was what had broken my fall and the misshapen steel could well have been my wrist. “Thank you, Father!” I prayed, “thank you for showing you are always there!”
I wish we could keep mementos of all the major accidents we were saved from, “Don’t repair the bent fender!” we shout, as the driver tries to straighten our car’s bumper after a small scrape with another car, “Why sir?” he cries out, and you know, he doesn’t want to drive around showing that he was not able to avoid an accident, “Because that will always remind us, how we escaped a major accident!” we whisper, “Just imagine, if we’d been in that same space a second earlier? We’d have been smashed to smithereens!”
I know of sons or daughters who come to me looking quite forlorn, “Hey,” I tell them, weren’t you supposed to get married? I remember hearing of your engagement?” “It’s been broken off!” They tell me looking quite despondent, and to such as them and you with broken fenders and small incidents like this do I want to point my twisted umbrella handle.
“It’s a reminder and memory that you were saved from something worse! Your engagement was broken off before worse happened in a marriage. I’m not sure where that umbrella is now, and maybe that’s why I have to remind myself whenever I have a minor skirmish, that a God above is saying, “Nothing more happened, because I held you…!”
—Email: bobsbanter@gmail.com
