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Last night I woke up with a desire to visit another room in our house. (I am trying to be delicate here!). I walked barefoot into that room and on my way back to bed felt a small jab in the sole of my foot, like I had stood on a pin or a sharp stone. I stopped, brushed the sole of my foot with my hand but there was nothing there. I ambled back to bed and thought nothing of it.

Until when I got up properly this morning. I found that the pain had not gone away and it felt like a pin was still sticking into the sole of my foot. But there was nothing there when I brushed my foot with my hand. After hobbling downstairs and into the kitchen I sat down and examined my foot more closely. There was a pink area where it was painful… proof that something nasty had happened to my foot. But there was no pin, stone or other obvious foreign object.

Then I looked even closer and saw that there was something embedded in the sole of my foot.

A hair!

It was stuck into the sole of my foot in the middle of the pink area. I pulled it out and stood up. The pain was considerably diminished and I have been walking normally for the rest of the day.

How on earth did a hair get embedded in my foot? It was too long to be one of my hairs, so was it planted by a particularly devious criminal mastermind? It seems so unlikely. It would have to have been sticking up at exactly the right angle, my foot would have to have impacted it in exactly the right way so that it did not crush the hair, the hair would have to have gone in far enough to stay stuck…

Surely not! But it did.

Often it is the apparently innocuous things that cause us pain that is disproportionately large. That comment made in passing. That angry look. That failure to thank someone. That deep sigh. That failure to say ‘hello’ in the street.

Are you familiar with the phrase ‘to take umbrage’? It means ‘to take offence’. I think that umbrage is a poison that should not be available on the NHS. All umbrage should be kept under lock and key and on a high shelf so that it is much more difficult to take. A lot of effort should have to be made for us to take umbrage and it should only be available in very small doses.

I think the antidote to umbrage poisoning is grace. Oodles and oodles of grace. Grace forgives. Grace disarms. Grace smiles. Grace laughs. Grace dissolves umbrage. It should be available to us all in limitless quantities.

What’s that?

It is?

Oh.

More fruit please, Spirit of God.

Umbrage dispensing…

A young girl who was writing a paper for school came to her father and asked, “Dad, what is the difference between anger and exasperation?”

The father replied, “It is mostly a matter of degree. Let me show you what I mean.”

With that, the father went to the telephone an dialed a number at random. To the man who answered the phone, he said, “Hello, is Melvin there?”

The man answered, “There is no one living here named Melvin. Why don’t you learn to look up numbers before you dial them?”

“See,” said the father to his daughter. “That man was not a bit happy with our call. He was probably very busy with something, and we annoyed him. Now watch . . .”

The father dialed the same number again. “Hello, is Melvin there?” asked the father.

“Now look here!” came the heated reply. “You just called this number, and I told you that there is no Melvin here! You’ve got a lot of nerve calling again!” The receiver was slammed down hard.

The father turned to his daughter and said, “You see, that was anger. Now I’ll show you what exasperation means.”

He dialed the same number, and a violent voice roared, “HELLO!”

The father calmly said, “Hello, this is Melvin. Have there been any calls for me?”