Last Christmas, my wife gave me a “Pearls Before Swine” cartoon-of-the-day calendar. I recently found the daily laugh for Tuesday, July 23 very funny — but it seems to have been a very bad omen.

For those unfamiliar with “Pearls Before Swine,” cartoonist Stephan Pastis’s major characters are Pig, Rat, and Goat — who are, respectively, a pig, a rat, and a goat. From time to time, one of them ventures up a steep mountain to see a donkey, the meditating guru named the Wise Ass on the Hill.

“Oh, great Wise Ass,” pleads Rat, “give me some advice to help me get through life.”

“In life,” replies the Wise Ass, “you cannot control what happens to you. But you can control how you respond.”

Descending the hill, Rat reports to Pig, “I was hoping he’d just say booze.”

The next morning, I walked downstairs and noticed an unpleasant, funky smell. Was it the garbage disposal? No. The dishwasher? No. The trash? No. What could it be?

Then I looked down the stairs to the basement. During the night a clog in the sewer main had caused a backup. While the main was cleared and the water drained out, the incident filled the bathtub with sewage and covered the floor with at least an inch of biohazardous black water — ruining bookcases, my desk, wooden filing cabinets, chairs, tables, a sofa, carpet, rugs, flooring, briefcases, and everything else with which it came into contact.

Within a couple of hours, a team from a local disaster mitigation company arrived, along with our insurance agent. That day they dealt with the residual filth and water, making the basement “safe” for the night while we helped remove everything that could be salvaged. Thursday and Friday they pulled up the flooring, all the baseboards, and the bottom two feet of drywall., which had been soaking up the black water (this is what’s known as a Category 3 Black Water Loss). Sixteen drying fans made a racket all weekend, and Monday they finished up as we inventoried everything that had to be thrown away. It was quite a list.

While I won’t deny that there was wine involved in dealing with the mess, I keep going back to the Wise Ass’s good advice: “In life, you cannot control what happens to you. But you can control how you respond.”

Lessons Learned

I know that all we had at my house was a smelly, toxic clean-up problem, and the basement now has to be rebuilt. But there was no loss of life or limb, no horrible diagnosis, no war or terrorism, no serious family problems or other tragedies like the ones some of you, dear readers, may have experienced.

Nonetheless, we live in a culture where even minor disturbances and problems have become increasingly intolerable, and we’re working through those feelings while trying to learn some lessons.

Here’s the first lesson I learned: It’s only stuff. Some items that went in the dumpster had sentimental value, but most met some need and will be repurchased. I can’t commandeer my wife’s desk forever, and books sitting in boxes instead of on shelves are mostly useless. But as someone (or many someones) once said, in the end it’s all going to burn. That is, when Jesus returns, all our fine possessions will show themselves to be nothing but “wood, hay, and stubble” destined for the fire (see 2 Peter 3:7-13). They’re merely “treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal” (Matthew 6:19) — and, of course, where sewage can back up and pollute.

Second lesson: I thought of a friend who was fired from his job telling us that it took him completely by surprise. Then he added, “But God wasn’t surprised.” Almost fifty years later, that’s still the most profound thing I’ve ever heard.

The sight of wastewater in my basement shocked me, but God wasn’t surprised by it. The prophet Habakkuk saw the sewage (if you will) of idolatry and immorality in Judah. He also saw that destruction and misery were advancing along with the Babylonian army. And he wrote a record of his struggle to find the goodness of God in what would be far worse than a sewer backup — death, destruction, slavery, exile. In that struggle, he clung to one simple truth: “The Lord is in his holy temple,” to which he added, “let all the earth keep silence before him” (Habakkuk 2:20).

Habakkuk learned what the anonymous author of the poem “When God Wants to Drill a Man” understood: In all life’s struggles and sorrows, “God knows what he’s about.”

Simple But Not Easy

I confess that these two lessons are somewhat less than profound. In fact, they’re the same old lessons over and over again. The things of this world — even the good things of this world — don’t last. And good times in this life don’t last. Either our treasure is in Heaven or we will one day discover, to our chagrin, that we have no treasure at all. And in this world, this “valley of tears,” God rules and reigns even if we neither see how nor understand why.

Living the Christian life is actually rather simple — which is not to say that it’s easy. It’s not easy. It’s difficult, and all the more so when things go wrong. But since we have no control over things going wrong, we can control how we respond — knowing that the world and the things of the world pass away and that we are loved by the One who controls all things.

It’s that simple.

James Tonkowich is a freelance writer, speaker, and commentator on spirituality, religion, and public life. He is the author of The Liberty Threat: The Attack on Religious Freedom in America Today and Pears, Grapes, and Dates: A Good Life After Mid-Life and serves as director of distance learning at Wyoming Catholic College. He also hosts the college’s weekly podcast, The After Dinner Scholar.