Some Merry Go Round!

Ride Hurts Children in Norwalk, CT Festival

"I can imagine it's a horrible feeling," he said. "This is supposed to be a great time of your life here and it turns out to be something different."





Let’s be clear.  They came to the Oyster Festival as they have done for years.  As we all did growing up.  Suddenly the ride just died…and kids got flung everywhere.  Second only to the sheer fright of those kids had to have been the parents who looked on helplessly.  The one father quoted above certainly got it right.  You show up for life expecting one thing and it hands you something drastically different.  We give thanks that nobody was seriously injured physically.  It will take its toll emotionally.  The kids and their parents will ride that ride for the rest of their lives. 

And what do we say for ourselves who go into life with one set of expectations and the tables turn on us?  Joan Didion wrote a little book called Salvador when there was great internal strife.  She said that you could fly into the city, see all the marks of western culture—the grand hotels, the playgrounds for the rich, the sparkling beaches—but you never knew when the ground you stood upon could swallow you alive in violence.  In our day and age, we could say we’d be enveloped in ours sleep with an odorless, colorless gas and never awake. 

The only way through this world is to pin your expectations on that Someone, that Place which is from everlasting—with light uncreated that the darkness never puts out.  I have heard it put this way. 

Ask God to change the way of the world and what happens, and you hear silence. 

Ask God to go with you through the suffering and you fall into an ocean of mercy.