johnbyronkuhner.com

            The desire for success is one of those traits that seem natural enough to a human being, and I have been convinced that this desire is laudable in myself because I have baptized it, by defining success as service to others.

            And yet I find in my life a continual thwarting of it, a scuttling of such hopes, which make me wonder whether this desire is in fact contrary to the will of the whole.

            Recently I experienced a minor instance of the phenomenon as it occurs in my life.  A friend of mine travels with a ball and a couple of baseball gloves in the trunk of his car.  When I came to visit him, we had a catch together at a farm where he was working over the summer.  As I drove home later that day, I looked in the passenger seat and saw: I still had his glove.  Typical.

            But I figured I could turn this forgetfulness into something good.  I had noted that he had not oiled his baseball gloves, which surprised me, because he was a very handy, very capable man who knew how to take care of things.  I had neat’s-foot oil at home.  I could oil up the glove and give it back to him in better shape than I borrowed it.

            I oiled the glove successfully, tied it up, and put it in a little roofed extension to my house.  Usually you leave a glove for a few days to let the oil dry and the pocket form.

            When I untied the glove a few days later, the leather looked beautiful: darker and richer and more supple.  It would be in good shape for years to come now.  But I gave a little cry when I saw: the leather threading between the fingers had been destroyed.  It was a different color from the rest, and at first I thought that perhaps it was a synthetic that somehow dissolved in neat’s-foot oil.  But as I inspected it, I saw the oil couldn’t have done this damage (the threading was leather).  What had done it was a mouse: he had come and eaten the rawhide.

            The threading of a glove is very difficult to repair.  I didn’t have the tools to do it.  And all my seeming goodness to my friend had evaporated: I had desired to do good for him, and instead had done only damage.  Perhaps I should have foreseen this damage: I live in a rural house, and once I had put a canvas bag in the extension, and a mouse had nibbled its edges.  But I didn’t think of it: a glove is not canvas, and mice typically came into the house during the winter. 

            And this I find to be true in my life generally: every time I try to justify my existence in any way, try to wash away my sin and make something good of it, some mouse comes along and mars what I have done, and the situation is worse than when I started.