“Mom, we found the Buddy Bench!” And everything went silent.
The children all stared at me, waiting to see my reaction.
I took a deep breath and quickly prayed for inspiration.
Two weeks earlier, there had been a district-wide search alert put out for the Buddy Bench. It was even in the newspaper. And now my kids had found it. It was the last thing I wanted to hear.
You see, the Buddy Bench creeps the heck out of our entire family. A local artist had been increasingly filling his yard, and the city property surrounding it, with … artwork: papier mache figures of people, stuffed dolls on poles … you get the idea.
Then the bench appeared, with green floating babies painted on it.
Sometimes I would walk by it with the kids and feel kind of sorry for it. “Hey guys, we should take a little rest. Why don’t we sit on that bench over there?”
“Aaaaahh!” they would all scream, running away in fear.
And now they had discovered the bench. It was in a yard down a nearby alley.
I wasn’t 100 per cent sure what the right thing to do was. After all, it was ugly. It scared my children. It scared me.
But it was someone else’s property and it had been taken.
All the kids thought I would say, “Let’s not tell anyone.” Then we’d all have a glorious laugh of victory. Buddy Bench has been conquered!
But they were watching me and waiting, and I knew that it was one of those moments.
To be clear, if the bench had had something objectionable on it, I wouldn’t hesitate to roast marshmallows over its smoldering ashes. But apart from finding it kind of disturbing, I knew I had to turn it in.
I told the kids that just because we didn’t like it, God expected us to respect the property of others. If we didn’t tell the owner, we would be participating in theft. As tempting as that was, maybe even only a venial matter, we couldn’t do it while still thinking of ourselves as walking with Christ.
So I wrote an anonymous note that said, “Your bench is down the alley. But it really creeps us out. Your entire yard creeps us out. I don’t want to see it anymore. PLEASE, take the bench indoors. Yours truly, Anonymous.”
Two days later, the newspapers announced an anonymous tip had come in, and glory be, the Buddy Bench was back on city property, chained to the ground for all eternity in bright pink metal.
I was thanked and praised in historically acknowledged records, and I really, really wished it hadn’t been me.
The point of the story is that sometimes it doesn’t serve us, on earth anyway, to do the right thing.
We can think, discern, and act upon the truth, trusting that we will receive God’s blessings for being honest and upright.
We make an effort, a sacrifice we think God wants us to make.
But the reality is, sometimes the Buddy Bench just shows back up. We follow God’s commands and still get the short end of the stick. There is no tangible blessing.
It might seem like we have every justified reason to compromise on what we know to be true. People tell us more good may come from a slightly questionable action. Yet we are still called to persevere in truth.
I know from personal experience that Lent is a time of these kinds of trials. We start out with good intentions, but we don’t see any tangible result. We tire of doing good. We tire of fasting. We tire of praying. We tire of slipping up in our fasting and praying. What is the point of persevering when there is no good outcome? And yet, we are still called to persevere.
God has the whole story in his hands. The fruits of our sacrifices, our honesty and righteous living, may not be known to us while we still breath, but we are called to it nevertheless.
Galatians 6 says, “And let us not grow weary in well-doing, for in due season we shall reap, if we do not lose heart.”
After every Lent comes Easter, and after every Buddy Bench … I’m not sure what, but I believe it will be good.
