Dropping Your Gourd and Humpty Dumpty

I can’t tell you the helpless feeling that swept over me. It was only a second of time that it took for the action to happen – but it seemed like 10 minutes. You know the slow motion of an object falling and you can’t do anything about it. Aaahhhh! Nuts!

I had been holding the gourd tightly and working on it diligently to get it ready to begin the art work on the side. It needed to be carefully scrapped and then sanded before the surface would be ready to apply the drawing.

The gourd is about as big as a melon and the shape of a very large apple to help you visualize what I was holding. In a split second it jumped out of my hand and fell gracefully through the air to the floor – and then THUD!

It had taken four months to dry this over the fall and winter – a year before. I had waited for this past year getting ready to now apply my idea to the surface.

My hands stopped flailing through the air in the vain attempt to catch the gourd as gravity took it. I looked over the edge of the table that I was working on to see the gourd was split from one end to the other. The crack was about 1/8 of an inch across and half way around the circumference.

Yes there were many words that immediately were drawn from the “hard drive” to “RAM” – but they didn’t appear on the “screen” nor the “speaker system” of my person.

Then I had a funny thought…
“Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

All the King's horses,

And all the King's men

Couldn't put Humpty together again!”

After doing a little research I found the following information. Realizing that a group of people have gone through the same disheartening loss as I did made me feel better. Here is the story…

Who was Humpty Dumpty?

Humpty Dumpty was a colloquial term used in 15th century England to describe someone who was fat or obese - giving rise to lots of theories pertaining to the identity of Humpty Dumpty. However, in this case the question should be not Who was Humpty Dumpty but What was Humpty Dumpty? Humpty Dumpty was in fact an unusually large canon which was mounted on the protective wall of "St. Mary's Wall Church" in Colchester, England. It was intended to protect the Parliamentarian stronghold of Colchester which was in the temporarily in control of the Royalists during the period of English history, described as the English Civil War ( 1642 - 1649). A shot from a Parliamentary canon succeeded in damaging the wall underneath Humpty Dumpty causing the canon to fall to the ground. The Royalists 'all the King's men' attempted to raise Humpty Dumpty on to another part of the wall but even with the help of ' all the King's horses' failed in their task and Colchester fell to the Parliamentarians after a siege lasting eleven weeks.

Now I am not sure that brightens your “February moments” – when you drop your gourd – or not? But in some ways it helps me to know that I am not the only one flailing trying to grab/preserve something I have worked so hard on for so long.

Discouragement comes fast. It settles in quickly for a long stay – at least it whispers that to me when it arrives unexpected. But it doesn’t have to stay.

As I reached down to pick up my gourd and then tested the structural damage – I said to myself… “Myself, you and I can fix this!” I reached for my trusty tube of “Crazy Glue” that will stick anything to anything. And within 15 minutes my Humpty Dumpty was back together again. The King’s horses and King’s men didn’t make it out of the stable area before my gourd was as good as new.

My simple thoughts – and emphasis is on ‘simple’ – is that God is interested in your gourd… and your Humpty Dumpty factor.

(Although I did find it comical to read that the dudes that mounted the cannon did so… on the protective wall of the “St. Mary’s Wall Church” – anyone else see the humour in that…?)

~ Pastor Murray Lincoln ~