A RINGING CELL PHONE HAS MY NUMBER

I wanted to crawl into the floorboards and live there for the next six months.

We were sitting in church during a sermon about our limitations as human beings. The room was still, as it often is when Pastor Woody weaves his stories.

Then the cell phone rang.

Not just any cell phone. My cell phone—and it pealed like the sirens of a British bobby. REE-ner, REE-ner, REE-ner.

I grabbed my purse and started rummaging as thoughts tumbled through my head like loose change in a dryer:

Where, oh where, is the phone?

REE-ner, REE-ner, REE-ner.

How did I forget to turn it off?

REE-ner, REE-ner, REE-ner.

I sure do wish I wasn’t wearing bright pink right now.

REE-ner, REE-ner, REE-ner.

Finally, I found the phone and turned it off.

I took a deep breath and slowly raised my head. The minister was looking right at me. Fortunately, it was Pastor Woody, a man as benevolent and kind as his name suggests.

He smiled at me and gracefully segued into an anecdote about a woman who answered her cell phone in an inappropriate setting and actually began holding a conversation. Gesturing toward me, he said, “I’m not talking about when we forget to turn off our phones. That can happen to anyone. We all make mistakes.”

Over the next few minutes, I felt the scarlet blush slowly creep back into my pores as I considered this one painful truth: Pastor Woody was kinder than I would have been.

I’m typically annoyed when someone’s cell phone rings. Why didn’t they turn it off? I wonder. Why don’t they have better manners? (Translation: Why are they not more like perfect little me?)

Now I was one of the very people I was so sure I wasn’t. I was embarrassed by my forgetfulness, mortified by my rudeness, and humbled by my past bad behavior in judging others. Chances are they simply forgot to turn off their phones. Chances are, they were just like me.

Once again my own bungling taught me a lesson in compassion. I’m all for enlightenment, but I sure do wish I’d figure out a different way to bring it on.

Well into my forties, I still seem hell-bent on learning the hard way. Just when I think I deserve something new and expensive as a reward for my own rectitude, I act like a complete fool and come face to face with irrefutable evidence that I am practically kin with the exact folks who drive me crazy.

I suppose this is true of most of us. Our mistakes and failures connect us to others in profound ways that our successes and conquests never will. It’s in the moments of humility, when we have no choice but to see our own foibles and missteps, that the seed of compassion takes root in our hearts. The more we stumble, the more our capacity for compassion grows like graceful willows.

By now I should have a whole forest of compassion taking seed in my own thumping heart. I recoil, for example, when I think of how many funerals I skipped until my mother died. And I regret how often I hurt others when I was so sure some wrongs were beyond forgiving—until I committed them myself.

Fortunately, I often seem to have someone kinder and more thoughtful just a whisper away to pick me up, brush me off, and plant another seed. Those grow sturdy trees, let me tell you.

No one was better at that than Lisa Hearey, who was frail and dying five years ago when we set off for one of her last chemotherapy visits.

I was driving, which always made me a little nervous because she was so fragile. At the end of her life she weighed only eighty-seven pounds, and every bump in the road made her wince. I always drove slowly, carefully, constantly checking her face to make sure I was not compounding her pain.

On this particular morning, though, we were running late, and, sure enough, ended up behind someone driving fifteen in a thirty-five-mile-per-hour zone.

“Why is he going so slowly?” I said, pounding the steering wheel.

Lisa reached over and gently laid her tiny hand on my arm. “Well, we don’t know why, do we?”

Down I stumbled. And another willow took root.