Little Boxes

Little boxes on the hillside,

Little boxes made of ticky tacky,
Little boxes on the hillside,

Little boxes all the same.

There's a green one and a pink one

And a blue one and a yellow one,

And they're all made out of ticky tacky

And they all look just the same.

(Little Boxes: words and music by Malvina Reynolds; copyright 1962 Schroder Music Company, renewed 1990.)

Inside those little boxes resides heartache and joy as individual as humans can be.  Pain, illness and triumph.  Does God look down upon the little boxes and does He point His almighty finger and decide when someone is just a little too happy?  Maybe things are going too well?  How does He decide when a family has enough of life’s trials and know when to grant a reprieve?

Does He point at number 21 and pronounce: this household will endure cancer and live with the constant anxiety of raising a special-needs child?  Next door at 23, maybe He says, “Give this hard-working couple four beautiful children and then toss in a debilitating lung infection to the mom.”  Across the street, take the mother of that young family in a devastating car accident.  A deaf person lives in number 140.  Around the corner, two spouses are each provided the opportunity of hurtful infidelity, and they each take it. In other neighborhoods… give the woman in 126 progressive senile dementia.  710, breast cancer.   822, you will have an estranged grown child for a while, for an unbeknownst reason.  Number 14 has to witness the painful aging decline of a once robust patriarch. 8264 gets bombarded with old age maladies so severe that the woman who lovingly raised and cared for eight children (nine, if you count the late husband), needs to be cared for herself now, 24 hours a day. The occupants of some other little boxes around the globe battle addictions, poverty, abuse, relentless health conditions, physical limitations and incapacitating mental illness.

But God, please reconsider the looming fate of number 412 and don’t condemn its beloved inhabitant to cancer.  Make the biopsy negative so that we can observe the benevolence and miracles that You can also bestow upon these unassuming little boxes.