Every once in a while I get an opportunity to truly shine… or at least, it seems that way at the time. In my mind’s eye, I see the plan unfolding flawlessly. I anticipate a need, meet it perfectly, and in the process, I earn the respect and admiration of all who are involved.
It’s a good feeling.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t usually happen that way!
No matter how simple or fool-proof it might seem, these things have a funny way of backfiring on me.
Last year around this time I had just joined Church At The Bay. I was still getting to know people and looking for opportunities to get “plugged in.” So when I heard that a group would be getting together to stuff eggs for the Easter Egg hunt, I signed up & even volunteered to bring some of the supplies!
I love Easter Egg hunts! I love stuffing the eggs – I even love picking out the candy and toys and other special touches. I love hiding the eggs. Most of all, I love watching the kids find the eggs.
So I went shopping. I picked out some cute little toys, and my cart was overflowing with candy. I even managed to squeeze in a couple of small boxes with 250 eggs inside. Unlike the large bags of plastic eggs that you normally see, these eggs were taken apart and neatly stacked. What an ingenious idea! What a space-saver! I imagined myself cracking jokes about bringing “egg-stra.”
That night about a half a dozen of us showed up to stuff the eggs. All of the other eggs were in those large bags of 48, and we went through them all in no time. In less than 40 minutes, we had stuffed over 1200 of them! Everyone was in a great mood.
Then we broke out one of my boxes. The first egg that I grabbed just didn’t want to snap together. Well, that was odd… but it must have been a dud. But one after the other, NONE of the eggs would close easily. It seems that having the halves stacked on top of eachother like that made the inside lip “stretch” just enough so that it wouldn’t fit easily into the other half anymore.
After 5 minutes I had managed to wrestle ONE egg closed. No one else on our egg-stuffing team was having any better luck. All of a sudden, my brilliant space-saving idea didn’t seem quite so brilliant. In the next half an hour, we managed to get maybe half of those eggs stuffed. It was discouraging! Instead of feeling like an egg-celent church member, I began to wonder if this incident would lead to my egg-scommunication instead. How embarrassing!
My ego (or should I say, my “egg-o”) was bruised.
Someone took a few of the really bad ones into the church office the next day and let the rest of the staff try to put them together. That weekend, those pastors showed me the results of their efforts – shattered egg halves, some deformed, some duct-taped together…
It wasn’t the outcome that I had desired, but now… my “bad eggs” are almost part of the church “folklore.” None of the folks who were involved will ever forget that night… and they probably won’t forget me either. It was embarrassing, but if everything had gone according to plan and there had been no "bad eggs", it wouldn't have been such a memorable evening. So even though it didn’t work out as planned, in the end… it did work out OK. And that’s no yolk!
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