DOWN HOME: Unintention & oscillation

Sometimes, the Law of Unintended Consequences smacks you upside the head.

This fall, Joanna and I took a trip to celebrate our 30th anniversary. This was a good thing.

After 30 years of wedded bliss, we decided to visit a part of the country we’d never seen. So, we flew to Boston and drove up to Maine.

When I think theologically, I understand God created all people and loves us all just the same. But after visiting different parts of the country (and the world, for that matter), I’m developing a theory that God’s love oscillates.

I’ve loved the word “oscillate” since I was a kid. Back then, my grandparents—Grammar and Popo—put oscillating fans in their bedrooms during the summer. These fans turn back and forth, so that one fan can stir the air all across the room as it pivots, or oscillates, from side to side.

Well, sometimes I think maybe that’s how God’s love does. It blows lovely, refreshing blessings on first one, and then another, and then back to the original one, and then back to the other.

Which makes me think of Maine. God invented special shades of crimson and gold and rust and green to paint the Maine hillsides in the fall. And the thundering grandeur of swelling waves crashing on the rocky coast blows the greatest symphony anybody ever heard, well, out of the water.

Meanwhile, as Jo and I enjoyed the pristine splendor of an autumn week in Maine, our family and friends back in Texas endured a week of gray skies, rain, occasional flooding and trees the same color they’d been for months and months—only soaked down to the flotsam and jetsam.

And so it felt as if God’s grace and love were shining on New Englanders just a bit brighter than it shone on Texans and Oklahomans.

That’s where oscillation comes in. Soon, those of us who live in the Southwest will be toasty in sweaters and light jackets on sunny 50-degree days, while our Yankee cousins will be bundled to the hilt and frozen to the marrow, trudging under leaden skies around snow piled high as a polar bear’s eye. And, although we’ll know it isn’t true, we’ll feel God loves us best.

Oh, back to the Law of Unintended Consequences: Before we left, I unplugged the TV so that, if we had a big storm, a power surge wouldn’t fry it down to the electromagnetic impulses. You think that’s smart and good? I did, too. And we both would be wrong.

When I intentionally set out to save the TV from lightning, I unintentionally disconnected the commands to record the programs Jo missed while we were gone. Three words you never want to hear from your spouse: “You did what?”

I felt as cursed by technology as New Englanders and Texans feel cursed by weather in February and July, respectively. But then Jo remembered our cable company will replay most of her shows on-demand.

Ah, oscillation.