We’ve had quite a week. We celebrated my oldest child’s First Communion (Great Joy), and endured my youngest child’s first surgery (Great Terror). The latter was an operation on both of his tiny eyes to correct a misalignment, and while routine, any operation, particularly on the eyes, is pretty scary.

We are in recovery mode now, and all are doing well. But for a while there it felt a little touch and go.

Which is exactly where I encountered Christ.

Dread has been building for months, but we had set our faces like flint and knew this was our best (and only) option. Unfortunately, less than 24 hours before surgery, the medical center called and said insurance hadn’t approved the operation. 4 hours later, after waiting on hold with multiple insurance agents and surgery coordinators, we discovered the surgery didn’t need approval; it was a clerical error. Nevertheless, they had already rescheduled the surgery for a less than ideal time for a fasting 3 year old, and we were trying desperately to fix it and make sure it happened at the originally scheduled time.

Which is why, chest pounding and anger rising, I left my office and went to a nearby park to clear my head, and to try, to no avail, to pray.

The medical coordinator called me while I walked. She said one of my insurance agents said my insurance was terminated. This made no sense at all. I was employed, I had just talked to my insurance company. But she swore someone said it. These were the sort of Kafka-esque never-ending nightmare conversations I had been having all morning: not only was no one able to help, but everybody trying to help the situation was just making it worse.

A little nudge told me to walk to a small bridge over a creek in the park. I was trying to pray, and for some reason a voice was telling me, “Walk to the bridge.” While on the way, I passed our parish Deacon, who happened to be walking the same trail. I gave him a quick hello and continued my frustrated phone conversation, surprised he was there while at the same time grateful I hadn’t been screaming desperately at one of the many helpless agents of our broken, misbegotten medical insurance system while he walked passed.

So I called my wife, who was also trying her hardest to get the insurance people and the surgery center to talk to one another. We commiserated and promise to text if someone called us back. It was, apparently, everyone’s lunch break but ours. Another frustrating moment.

I walked onto the bridge with a rising sense of anger and despair. We had been praying and preparing for this for months. Why the last minute chaos? I looked into the dark brown water of the flooded creek below. It had been raining for days, and the banks were swollen and muddy. All the usual wildlife seemed distant or drowned beneath the surface. I too felt the water rising.

Which is when the deacon walked along the bridge. I was surprised again, thinking that he was heading home when we had first passed each other. But he was looping back around.

“The Bridge of Hope,” he said, in his deep gentle baritone, as he approached. “I’ve prayed here many times.”

Bridge of hope? I thought. More like bridge of despair. But where I saw despair, he saw hope.

He mentioned he would pray for me and for my son tomorrow, and I told him all that had occurred over the past few frustrating hours. He listened quietly and then said, gently, “Well, do you want to pray?”

“Sure,” I said, a bit dumbfounded. I’d been trying to pray all morning, but it’s hard to get centered when you feel like you’re in a blender. And I was feeling like an anxious parent smoothie at that moment.

He put his hand on my shoulder and we closed our eyes. He prayed words I could not pray, asked for things I couldn’t ask for. But then he stopped suddenly, and in a voice a higher octave than normal, shouted “There’s a snake! Look!”

I opened my eyes and in the creek below, a small black snake slithered along the top of the water. From right below where we were standing.

Now, I’m not a snake hater, but at that moment, the last animal I wanted to see was a serpent.

“A snake?” I said, “that’s not the sign I’m looking for right now.”

“Those are all your troubles, leaving you,” he replied. “Look, look at them go, swimming away. Goodbye trouble, don’t come back.”

We both watched the snake swim away and disappear from view behind an old rotten log.

“Goodbye trouble,” he said again. “See you later.” He smiled widely.

We shook hands and hugged. I thanked him for praying for me. It all felt so surreal. The stress, the bridge, the snake. I walked back to my car like a man in a dream.

But within the next hour, the surgery was rescheduled to the right time, the right date, the right place. The agents who had been so unable to help earlier, suddenly became very helpful. My troubles, at least for the moment, were gone.

And the next day the surgery, while heart-wrenching and nerve-rattling, went well, and recovery, while challenging, is progressing as it should.

“They recognized him in the breaking of the bread” the Gospel tells us. On the road to Emmaus, Christ was in their midst but they were too sunk in despair to recognize him. Finally, when breaking bread together, they recognize him. And then he vanishes.

I recognize him in the breaking of the bread too, at both the Eucharistic table and the table of fellowship I share with family and friends of all faiths and those between faiths, over a meal or a beer or in the sharing of hearts and hopes and fears.

But lately, I’ve recognized him more in the breaking of our hearts, in the sharing of those edgeless spaces where despair yawns before us, and people of kindness, warmth and good will wrap us, unexpectedly and without guile or expectation, in God’s loving care. It’s like standing at the abyss and knowing you are wrapped in God’s love, and while hidden and mysterious, it’s as predictable as our next breath: People show up when you need them. And you show up when others need you. We belong to each other, and our troubles, while unwelcome, teach us that. We are all in this together.

One body, one heart, one mind, one God, “lovely in limbs and lovely in faces not his”, graciously showing up, amidst the joys and sorrows of life, especially in those times when we need it most.

Praise God for everyday goodness, amidst all of life’s troubles.