The Strange Thing About Being You

I met someone recently who was saying that inevitably in life things go awry. That's just the way it has always been. "Just watch and see!" she exclaimed, "Something will go wrong. That's just the way it always is with me. I am always that one bizarre exception."

I sat there thinking, that is definitely not the case with me. I mean, certain things will predictably go wrong. I will get lost. I'll burn a meal. I'll lose my phone or my keys, I have my trials that come up from time-to-time, but otherwise, things don't go wrong as a matter of course.

And she wasn't making it up either. She kept telling me stories of these outlandish things that happened to her. Things that totally weren't her fault. She followed the rules, and as luck would have it, in story after story, her twist of fate was just unfortunate.

My twist of fate is a little different. I have this strange phenomenon that tends to occur more and more as my life is more in order (i.e. live closer to the Spirit). This was especially prevalent while I was a missionary. It was so uncanny. As any good piece of literature has threads running through it, or themes, so is my life. These threads or themes will typically be present for about two weeks. Then the theme changes. During the time of each theme, I will usually run into people who are uniquely suited to this recurring theme. And the books I will read - they all lend to this cohesive theme.


For example, on this last trip I was reading a book about a newspaper editor who kept his paper going throughout the war. He detailed his struggles to both establish and maintain his right for independent news reporting. I was captivated by his struggles to fight the new democratic government who was trying to control his paper the way things were done during the Yugoslavia communist days. It got me thinking and pondering freedom of the press.

I had the book on my lap during my flight from Austria to Sarajevo - and who did I sit next to on the airplane but a man who was a war correspondent for 18 years and who knew the author. Yes, yes he did.

We spent the rest of the airplane ride talking about news, freedom of the press, Bosnia, politics, and the Balkans and he was fascinating.

And you may think, well, you were on a plane headed to Sarajevo, so the odds of you meeting a person who knew him in a city of 300,000 are not too bad. But a seasoned war correspondent who spoke English, had covered the Bosnian war, and of all of the people on the plane he was assigned the seat next to me, and who was also willing to talk to me for the entire flight? Come on.  And things like this - totally unplanned, are not  out of the ordinary.

Did I mention that when we got to Croatia we were stopped by a radio reporter who was doing a piece on whether or not people thought the press was free in Croatia? And that it also happened to be  Free Media Day? The reporter recorded our entire conversation as we spoke about freedom of the press in Croatia. I asked her a lot of questions.

Well, today was my day for returning my library books. Being the dutiful citizen I am 3/4ths of the time, I returned my Bosnia books. When I originally checked out these books, there was one book that I had seen in the list of books about Bosnia - one about the forensics of the Bosnian war. Not knowing much about the Bosnian war before leaving, I didn't opt to get this book.

However, while we were going through the museum about the mass genocide in Srebrenica, Bosnia I realized I wanted to read that forensics book. The one picture from the museum that really made me realize I wanted to was a picture of a huge warehouse full of evenly spaced blue tarps, and each tarp had a skull, bones, and clothing of a body they exhumed. Oh my goodness. What an awful task. The recordings further explained that they have primary, secondary, and tertiary graves, so piecing together bodies that may be found in multiple sites (sometimes up to seven) is difficult. Even though it has been 20 years since the war, they aren't done yet. It made me think of the forensics book I had chosen not to borrow and I made a mental note to borrow it when I got home.

Well, wouldn't you know that as I returned my old books the librarian seemed incredibly knowledgeable about Bosnia. NBD, he lives in St. Louis, and he is a librarian. They are smart people and we have lots of Bosnians here. I shouldn't be surprised.

I asked him to help me locate this book. All I gave him for clues was that it had something about forensics and Bosnia. He looked for a while and came up with nothing, but finally he found it. I went to get the book and then came back to him to check me out.

Wouldn't you know - of all of the librarians on this entire planet - this guy has a morbid obsession with genocides. He has done a great deal of reading about Bosnia. He has even  read up about ones all over the world. Did you know there was one in East Timor - of all places? Well, they stopped it before it became mass genocide, he said.

I just left the library chuckling to myself. Of course, of course the random librarian who checks me out while I get my Bosnian forensic book has a morbid obsession with genocide. It is a coincidence, but these instructive coincidences happen all the time - when I am in tune. I think many of us probably have strange things about being us. I don't know what yours are, but I suspect there are patterns of some sort that run through your life, too.