Screening out the human

Jim sat in his wheelchair and with his permission I sat on the edge of his bed to be able to chat with him.  He lived at the nursing home where I came once a month to lead a morning prayer service, and this was the first time in years we had really talked.  It was the first time I was in his room, rather than just chatting in passing in the common room before and after the service.

Tomorrow is his birthday, he told me.  Said he will be 67, and when asked, suggested that maybe the reason he looks younger than me is he still has a good head of dark hair.  Unprompted, he told me he is happy.  Asked why, he said because he is alive, because he "has his brain back" after suffering a stroke, and because of his family whose pictures he showed me on the wall above his bed.  "I have so much, and some people don't," he said, with one of the most honestly contented looks on his face and in his eyes that I have seen for some time.

The reason I was talking with him was that I missed the memo.  The nursing home activities director had emailed me earlier in the morning that due to staff turn-over and illness, they were cancelling the prayer service.  Not enough staff to manage what needed to be done to make it happen.  I didn't log on, though; I was out of the electronic loop, showed up not knowing the plan ... and found myself with some unexpected free time just to visit with some of the prayer service regulars.

And because I was out of the electronic loop, because I failed to plug in and log on and look at my laptop screen, I found myself serendipitously receiving some wonderfully warm, personal and welcome schooling in gratitude, one of the foundational elements of any honest spirituality. 

A few hours later I was on the run again, this time rushing into a Tim Horton's for a meeting with another staff member at the church.  I placed my order, paid for it, and got my coffee.  Then, in the very few seconds it took to move down the counter to the prep area to wait for my Chicken Ranch Wrap Snacker (my lunch), disaster struck.  The in-store computer network went down, all orders were lost from the now-blank screen in front of the prep person, and no amount of hitting the refresh button was bringing anything back on line.

And she did try.  A lot.  Frantically.  Panic gripped her face, and terror of the unknown pooled deep in her eyes.  She wasn't trained for this.

Shortly, though, I and the couple waiting beside me were able to calm her, and convince her we could tell her what we had ordered, and she would still be able to prepare it for us.  And it worked.  What a wonderful system!

It really felt wonderful.  Yeah, there was risk to Tim Horton's that we would make up some order ridiculously more expensive than what we had actually paid for.  But for once -- and I never really noticed its absence until this moment of its restoration, we completed our order at the counter with a real, honest-to-goodness, person-to-person interaction about what we were doing, without a screen between us guiding our every action and making trusting, human conversation between us unnecessary.

It's enough to make me wonder.