LOL, this reminds me of a story my husband is very fond of. This is a version of it:
A salesman is in the middle of farmland in Iowa, driving home on a country road from his last sales call. It’s late at night and snowing like crazy. He’s tired and hungry. He gets a flat tire. Grumbling, he gets out of the car to get the spare tire and the jack from the trunk.
There
is no jack. What’s he supposed to do now? He can’t fix the flat without the jack. He decides to look for a house so he can borrow their jack. He sees the lights of a farmhouse in the distance and thinks ‘Farmers are always to friendly and helpful…I’ll go knock on their door.’ Grumbling again, he realizes he will have to cross several fields to get to the house. As he starts out he puts his foot right into a deep puddle. Yuck! Now his foot is cold and wet and his best shoes are probably ruined. He thinks to himself – “As long as the people in the house are friendly and helpful, it’ll be worth the effort.”
He climbs over the barbed wire fence to cross the first field and he tears his coat on the fence. “Oh, $%#@, I loved that coat!” Now becoming angry, the salesman stomps across the field toward the house and thinks “I sure hope that farmer wants to help me.”
The salesman falls down in the field and now has mud on his pants. He’s cold, tired and dirty and just plain mad about everything. He thinks “I bet that farmer isn’t going to want to help me – I bet he doesn’t even have a jack!” But he keeps gong because he doesn’t have any other options. As he approaches the farmhouse, the salesman slips on a pile that one of the cows left. He’s now cold, tired, dirty and smells like he’s rolled in the barnyard. Absolutely furious, he thinks “That farmer is probably sleeping – I’m going to wake him up and he’ll be rude and won’t help me. What a jerk…”
Finally, the salesman storms up to the house and pounds on the front door. After a few minutes, the farmer comes to the door in his pajamas. To his amazement, the stranger at his door screams at him! “Well, if you’re going to be that way, you can just keep your d#$%ned jack!” waving him off as he storms off his porch.
So, at our house, when we start catastrophizing over something that might not be as bad as we think, the quip to wake us up is, "Well, then, just keep your d#$%ned jack!”
Again, though: your friend didn’t do anything that any of us might not do. Encourage him to stay positive. These misunderstandings are part and parcel of parish life, and it is best to try to keep a sense of humor about them, both towards ourselves and towards others. After all, we hope we’ll all be spending eternity together, and that’s a very long stretch!!
