HOME OWNERS INSURANCE IS MY FRIEND! At lunchtime today I listened to a very animated and knowledgeable speaker as she shared her experiences in the African country of Uganda. She spoke from the ground of one who has worked there in the Peace Corp as a young woman, and then later on in several different capacities as a Rotarian. The poverty and need in this country is great, as evidenced in the slides she showed. I was touched with the medical and health care struggles both young and old endure. As I watched the slides flash buy, I was reminded of another time when I was listening to a young, American educated African speak to a group of men. He had been chosen from his tribe to be a “missionary” to America, and had then gone back home to share his experiences with his home town and family. He spoke of sitting around with the men of the tribe, trying to explain life in America. He told us of the difficulties his family had in understanding some of our ways of life. “One of the hardest things for my tribe to understand,” he told us, “ was the concept of Home Owners Insurance.” I remember we all laughed as we grasped the notion of trying to explain any kind of insurance to a people who lived in mud huts, and owned very little. “For a long time,” he said, “They just couldn’t comprehend it, and then one of my tribesmen said, ‘Oh, I understand. Nothing ever happens to these people.’” Wow! He told us of things always happening in his country. “Huts burn, young people die, woman don’t survive childbirth, in some seasons our crops wither. When this happens, we weep, scream, and cry! We pray and hope and then accept.” He went, on, “Here in America, you try as hard as possible to avoid doing these things. We rebuild and try again. You try to “duck” anything you don’t see as good.” Well, duh.... I remember thinking then, as I do now, how right he is! I don’t want to deal with any of those tragedies in my life, and I suspect, neither do most of my friends and neighbors. I do have Home Owners insurance, Life Insurance, Car Insurance, and even insurance on my Iphone in case I drop it in the dog’s water dish. (Like Sue did) I have health insurance, and I just brought my car back from the 25,000 check in order to keep my Warranty in force. I am one protected dude. How about you? Security system? Check. Generator? Check. Motion detector lights? Check. Dead bolts? Check. You get the idea. We do this in order to ensure safety in our lives. We want to be protected from.... well, from, whatever. And the best way I know to do that is to either control as much as possible, and insure what’s left. Advent Security calls the police if a burglar breaks into my house, and my Insurance reimburses me for the loss of my Rembrandt. Hah! However, the sad fact is we can’t stop life from happening to us. My very good friend with Oral Cancer is a reminder to me, and my very intelligent and articulate graduate school professor, who can’t remember his name points it out. Fires burn houses, people get sick, relationships bust open, travelers get mugged, and the list goes one. We know all this, but hate to stop and think about it. We don’t want to be reminded of how scary life can be. As the author, Jodi Picoult write, “You’ll tell yourself anything you have to, to pretend that you’re still the one in control.” Boy, is that the truth! So... I’m back to where I end up so many times in these Laments. Everything seems to come back to Trust.... that I can handle what life throws at me, that I’m not alone in this Universe, and that I’m held by a Loving Spirit. When that happens, as Julia Cameron writes, “It’s a process of surrender, not control.” My Lament for tonight is for the countless ways I work at protecting myself and the people I love, as well as the stuff I buy and save, by attempting to control what happens all around me. Things do happen to us, and this is the nature of life. When I trust, I am able to release the stress. As Steve Maraboli says, “You were never in control anyway.”
Posted on: Wed, 01 Oct 2014 21:26:03 +0000
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