Lessons from a Fender Bender

Description

I keep thinking about a small fender bender in a grocery store parking lot, because somehow, in that ordinary little mess, a holy lesson shows up. Swedenborg writes in Secrets of Heaven §3138 that “human rebirth is an image of the Lord’s glorification,” and while that sounds impossibly high and cosmic, we see its reflection in the smallest human moments. A police officer walks into a tense scene with a smile and asks the only question that really matters: “Are you okay?” Then he points to the dent and says, “This is just a material thing.” So good. That is the sermon. We are reborn, again and again, through the way we bring God’s presence into ordinary life, through use, through doing our work “sincerely, justly, and faithfully,” through the “language of the soul” that adds kindness where anger could have taken over. Most of life will not ask us to be heroic. It will ask us to be faithful in the small stuff, to bring just a little more kindness into the world, and to remember, even in the parking lot, what matters most.