Irony is one of my favorite things....

...which is fortunate because life is full of it.

Even the simplest parts of a day may be found to contain irony if you scrutinize them enough.

Before I sat down at my computer just now, I was going to sit down at the piano.  I didn't make it there because I was struck by an ironic thought.

I was headed to the piano to play a song about lightning bugs.  It's a song I made up several years back.  Every year when the lightning bugs come, I am super excited to see them.  I chase them around the yard, catch them in my hand, let them crawl around my fingers, and admire their cheerful glow.  Then I quickly take them for granted.  Before I know it, before I've hardly had a chance to give them more notice, they vanish away with the rest of the summer.  It is very sad.  In the song, the lightning bugs serve as a metaphor for the people in my life.  You see, I have the unfortunate tendency to take people for granted, just as I do my glowing insect friends.  I assume they will always be there, that things will always be the same, and one day...life happens.  Things change.

Where is the irony in this situation?  The irony is double-decker, I suppose.  Firstly, I was going to sit at the piano and play a song about how I take lightning bugs for granted when I could have been outside chasing lightning bugs.  Secondly, had I gone outside to chase lightning bugs, I would have missed the whole metaphoric point of the song, which is to pay more attention to the people in my life.  Frolicking around with bugs, as much fun as that may be, is not going to help me build and nurture relationships.    Neither, I fear, is spending time sitting at my computer writing a blog post about the whole matter.....but at least some people read this.  There is some human connectivity involved.  :)

Another somewhat ironic thing that happened lately is that I whacked my head on a cabinet during VBS.  I mean, really whacked my head.  Like, Sue-Plattner-and-Whitney-rushed-me-to-Convenient-Care-as-I-clutched-my-bloody-forehead whacked.

We were reenacting the fall of Jericho.  We had all the chairs stacked on the table ("the wall of Jericho"), and we were marching around it 7 times.  Yeah, how can that go wrong, right?  Well, it did go wrong, but not in the way you might expect.  (That's the ironic part. we feared someone would get hurt by the chairs stacked on the tables, BUT...)  The kids kept messing with the markers on the white board as they marched past, so I grabbed all the markers to remove the temptation.  At the end of lap #7 around the "wall", I dropped one of the markers....right under the cabinet....and as I stood up to continue marching, WHACK!  My glasses were off, and I was on the ground.  The kids were pretty concerned, but the nice doctor at Convenient Care glued me up, and in 30 minutes I was welcomed back to church by my applauding 1st and 2nd graders. :)  

Haha, it makes a good story, right?  And actually, some good came out of it.  The kids seemed to learn something from the whole event.  One of them commented later, "If we wouldn't have been playing with the markers, Sarah would never have gotten hurt."  Hmm.....well, if it helps the children learn a valuable lesson, I'm happy to take one for the team.  :)