I just finished another novel by Barbara Kingsolver – one of my favorite authors – called Prodigal Summer. The book covers three separate stories of love over one summer in the southern Appalachians each celebrating the prodigal spirit of human nature as well as of nature, itself. As the stories evolve, they become interconnected.

One of the stories involves an elderly man, Garnett, and his elderly neighbor, Ms. Nannie Rawley, with whom he has always been in conflict. He has always prided himself on his biblical literalism and his political conservatism. He is slowly beginning (without knowing it) to find his predisposition of being dogmatically correct unsatisfying. He is beginning to experience the knowledge that being right is no longer making him happy – and he has always believed the two, being happy and being right, were inseparable.

Garnett is on his way to Pinkies for the weekly All-You-Can-Eat dinner of catfish and hush puppies. The very beginning of his transformation to understanding that his being happy is far more important than being right, is captured in the following paragraph [ISBN-0-06-095903-7, Prodigal Summer, Harper-Collins, 2000, p.134]: “… Pinkie’s was Garnett’s only extravagance, and he liked to look forward to it. He did not tend to eat well since his wife had died. It had been enough years now that he had gotten used to cold meat sandwiches for dinner and a single placemat on the table, but he had never learned to cook. Certainly not something like a hush puppy. How would you even begin to make a hush puppy, what in the world was in one? Nothing to do with a puppy, surely. Garnett had long known, though he didn’t much like to admit it, that God’s world and the better part of daily life were full of mysteries known only to women.”

Often, I find myself looking for lightening bolts or thunder claps when an “AHA” moment or an experiential transformation occurs. However, my experience over the last 30+ years of sobriety has been that most transformational moments come with a beginning similar to that of Garnett’s. He will probably never recall that this was the beginning of a different perception of happiness for him. I only have had two or three Damascus-Road-kind of transformational moments. Clearly, most of mine have been like Garnett’s, since I am no longer the man I used to be. Somewhere along the way transformations were occurring – unknown to me.

I need to be more sensitive to the little things. What about you?

Blessings, Don My book, How the Bible Became the Bible is available for sale.