“Hey, guys, look at this.”
Workers at the wrecking yard, grabbing their morning coffee, gathered around the multiple screens displaying visuals of the far reaches of the acres of damaged cars under surveillance.
As with all the cameras – capable of reading expiration dates on vehicle license plates – one of the cameras showed on one of the monitors, a woman, her arms crossed over the door frame on the driver’s side, her head buried in the crook of an elbow, her body pressed up against the door.
She wasn’t moving.
“Could one of you check on her?”
She was crying.
“Can I help you miss?”
“I’m just saying goodbye to a good friend.”
She sobbed out her story, shared about the accident, acknowledged it was after all just a car, but the memories they’d made together, the places they’d gone. . ..
Her voice trailed off.
Broken glass was everywhere, clear to the back of the car. The windshield had imploded to within mere inches of where her face had been. Shards of glass had penetrated her clothing.
“You’re lucky to be alive,” he offered.
Someone wrote that “Love (and life too for that matter) is not measured by the breaths we take but by the moments that take our breath away.”
The places she’d been in that car, the things she’d seen, the vistas of soft blue baby-blanket skies stretching as far as the eye could see, these had taken her breath away.
And the accident could have done the same.
There’s an ancient proverb that declares “a merry heart enjoys life” (Proverbs 15:15).
Translated, write commentators, it means that real happiness is not defined by external things but by the state of the heart.
A merry heart, in other words, is one that can rise above present circumstances.
A disposition that can retrieve the few belongings – including life itself – from disaster, is a merry heart, a composed, quiet, and content heart.
A merry heart, while it appreciates things, knows far more importantly the value of life and of love.
She wiped at her tears as he gathered up the few possessions that had been left behind.
Then one last time she lovingly patted the car, turned, and walked away.
