judgments have endings. stories do not…

On July 28, 1976 I left Tennessee to drive to Denver, Colorado to meet friends in The Big Thompson Canyon for a camping trip. I decided to drive straight through, enabling me to arrive in Denver in about 30 hours. That’s good! my friends said. It’ll give us an extra day in the canyon before we head to Banff.

On July 29 the engine overheats, forcing me to spend the night somewhere in Kansas, delaying my trip. That’s bad, my friends said.

On July 31 I pull into Denver and head towards The Big Thompson Canyon. I’ll get us a spot and you meet me up here when you get off work, I say. Great! my friends say. That’s good.

Later that evening as I drive up The Big Thompson Canyon the rain is pouring. It’s cold, miserable, muddy. That’s bad, I think.

I’m driving back to Denver. It’s too wet and cold to camp out tonight I explain. That’s too bad, my friends say.

The next day dawns  sunny  and clear. We head up to the canyon only to be met by road blocks. There’s been some bad flooding and the road is washed away, we hear. That’s bad. We can’t get up into the canyon and have to drive four hours around. If we’d only been here last night….I say. That’s bad.

On July 31, 1976, a violent rainstorm set off the most massive flash flood in a century and sent a rampaging wall of water through Big Thompson Canyon, wiping out homes, moving boulders the size of office buildings for miles downstream and destroying roads the length of the canyon. The massive millennial flood killed 144 residents and visitors at one of Colorado’s most popular destinations. Bodies continued to wash up days after the flood, some in the fields of farmers downstream. Some were found in cars. Some were never found.

Looking back on the sequence of events we labeled “good” and “bad” I realized had any of the bad things not happened the good things – our ultimately NOT being in the canyon that night as we originally planned, would not have happened. Is something good? Or is it bad? It’s hard to tell at the time. When Steve Jobs was fired from his job at Apple or when Oprah Winfrey was moved to another station (fired from her reporting job and “stuck” into a talk show job) things looked bad. But looking back, they say it was the very thing they thought so “bad” at the time that turned out to be the best thing that happened to them. Look back over your life. When has that happened to you? Are you so sure it’s not happening again now? Judgments have an ending. Stories do not. Let the story play out – whether it takes days, months or years.