Um Provérbio Português

Two weeks ago I was in Sao Paulo. I was talking to Roberto, a 22-year-old with spiky hair and a passion for playing Farmville. Somewhere in the middle of a rather mundane conversation he quoted an old Portuguese proverb that made me sit bolt upright:
God writes straight with crooked lines.

The instant I heard it, I knew that there was something magical in its simplicity. But then it took me a few days to really appreciate just how much had been said in those few words.

Perhaps I got distracted by the word 'God'. As an atheist, I am sometimes a bit slow to absorb ideas that refer to Him. (And no, I am not such a rabid atheist that I would de-capitalize God or His pronoun.) But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that whether or not He exists, He does indeed write straight with crooked lines.

I can think of times when something happened in my life that made me stop dead in my tracks and ask Why me? Why do I deserve this? And somehow, unexpectedly, that bad thing led to something good. I'm not suggesting for even a second that whenever something bad happens, something good will follow to compensate. It's not as if the universe would try to compensate us, like some retail chain threatened by a lawsuit.

But I am beginning to believe that sometimes bad things have a way of mysteriously begetting good things. The gestation period can be so long that the connection is really, really hard to see. And if you are in the middle of the bad thing (and if you are a normal person with normal emotions!) it's probably impossible to imagine that anything good could come from what you're going through.

But if you think about something that happened years and years ago that angered and saddened you, and then you take a step back and another and maybe a few hundred more, you just might be able to see the straight line that connects that bad thing to something else that's good and that you can be grateful for.

And if you can do that, then maybe you can also believe in my other favourite piece of practical wisdom from Brazil:
It'll all be okay in the end. And if it's not okay, then it's not yet the end.

I'll leave the last words for Scot James, a man who is living proof that God writes straight with crooked lines.