Of Worms and Men

By Bobby Neal Winters

After a long, wet spring, summer is here.  We are living in the cleansing rays of the unrelenting Kansas sun.  It sees all; it knows all.

I was taking my walk the other day and saw an earthworm who had tunneled out of the grass by the sidewalk.  It was still moist enough for that to happen.  

Had the worm turned away from the sidewalk, he would’ve been all right; he had a 50-50 chance. Alas for him, he had turned toward the sidewalk.  

It was one of our many brick sidewalks. And he was writhing in the earthworm equivalent of agony on a brick that had been raised to searing heat by the solar rays.

I was watching.  I always keep an eye on the sidewalks as I walk.  I saw the worm’s agony, his pain, his torment, and like the Priest or the Levite in the story of the Good Samaritan, I kept on walking.  I left him there like a soul damned in Hell.  

I feel a little bit guilty about it, but only a worm’s worth.

God’s eye is on the sparrow; I suppose it’s on the earthworm too.  I might rationalize that those two concepts might connect and the sparrow would eat the worm, but there’s a thing I’ve noticed:  This happens to worms a lot.  I see a lot of dried up earthworms on brick sidewalks.

When a worm is in the dirt, digging its way around, it is reasonably safe.  (I don’t know much about the day-to-day life of a worm. At least it’s in its habitat.) But when it bursts through the surface, it has literally and figuratively crossed a boundary.  There is very little in its experience or in the collective experience of its kind that has prepared it for what comes next.

It is Lost.

Until I was 26 years old, I was a Southern Baptist. Others may have had a different experience, but everything I’d ever been taught as a Southern Baptist was focused toward saving the Lost.

That was the Beginning, the Middle, and the End of it.

Every sermon, every altar call, every revival.  That was the focus.  Indeed, that seems to me that’s all there was, but that was many years ago.  We make decisions and then we change our memories to justify those decisions.

What I do remember though, and what I do believe is true, was that the church was our connection to the world.  It was a small, rural community. There was no culture other than basketball during its season and church. That was it; that was life.

If you chose to go, church was twice on Sunday (Sunday School and worship in the morning and worship again in the evening) with another opportunity on Wednesday night.

There was connection; there was accountability; there was life.

I know a man.  I was once his teacher. He’s fallen on hard times. He’d always smoke pot, but there’d been an accident; surgery; pain.  He got hooked on painkillers.  He’d once had a sharp, sharp mind. 

He approached me sometime back with some rocks he’d found.  He was convinced that they were quite valuable.  He wanted me to help him get money from them, but it wasn’t quite clear how.  It was quite clear, however, what he wanted the money for: drugs.

“Can you help me, Dr. Winters?”

I asked him if he’d ever considered a 12-step program.

“You don’t understand, Dr. Winters. I don’t need your help in getting off drugs. I need your help to get money to buy drugs.”

If I wind up going to hell, I will be listening to that conversation on a loop.

We need a place to be plugged in.  We need a place to belong. We need a group to be accountable to. 

Otherwise, we wander off and become...lost.

The promise of Liberal Christianity is that you get to choose your own way of being; you get to live by your own rules; no one tells you what to do.

More conservative religions are tacitly (and sometimes not so tacitly) deprecated because they are told what to do by their minister, priest, rabbi, or imam.  Could it be, however, that being told what to do is not a bug in the religion, but a feature?

Do we choose schools or colleges that say, “We don’t tell our students that two plus two is four.  If they want the sum to be 3 or 5, then that is their choice.”

We can walk by a worm dying on a sidewalk and pass it by without saving it because it’s just a worm.  To walk past a lost human is worse, but a human can’t be saved until he wants to be.

Sometimes all we can do is pray.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.