Trumpeting Grace

I hadn’t agreed with everything in the book I’d picked up, but right after I read that one story, I went looking for an old horn to screw right to the wall — because there really are things worth the proclaiming.

And when I find this one old horn, I walk around the house, horn in hand, trying to figure if it looks best on this wall?

Or maybe on the back of this door? The Farmer raises his eyebrows.

“A horn on a wall?” He’s grinning boyish. Joshua is playing scales. Levi’s reciting Latin chants. Shalom and Malakai are arguing loud over a game of chess.

“Because you’re thinking it’s not quite loud enough in here yet?”

“You!” I poke him in the shoulder, him broad like a beam that carries half my world. “Does it look right here?”

“I think I’ve got a wall out in the barn it might look perfect on.” He winks, shields himself with his arm to fend off the next poke.

“But if you knew the story …” I try to defend and he nods, knowing, smiling, “Uh-huh.” And I nod, knowing stories can turn around whole hard hearts. Jesus walked back roads and spun stories and turned around lives and the axis of the cosmos.

So I tell this story at lunch.

“A man drove a stretch of highway past this tattered cardboard sign that read ‘Honk if you’re happy.’ “ I pass down the squash.

And who doesn’t roll his eyes at such naïveté? As if the world is this strange hybrid of Pollyanna and Sesame Street — if you’re happy and you know it, honk, honk — when it’s really just a strange new, old world, broken and a mess. Shalom offers me her glass and I pour water.

“But there’s this one day when the man drives past the sign with his little girl, and on a whim he beeps the horn. And every day when he passes the sign, his daughter begs him to do it again, and pretty soon, every time he’s on this stretch of highway, this jaded man, this cynical man, is anticipating the sign. Anticipating honking his horn. And do you know what he said?”

I want to make sure I get it right. I push back my chair, to get the library book from my nightstand. Flip through the pages … There — that one good story in the book:

I lay the book down on the table, reach for the water pitcher.

“See what happened to him? The sign read, ‘Honk if you’re happy.’ And he discovered that the act of honking the horn — it made him happy.”

“Honk, honk!” Malakai grins at the end of the table. His mouth’s full of food. I love him wild.

“So who puts up a cardboard sign beside a highway — Honk if you’re happy?” I have to get to the rest of the story before the table erupts into a fest of honking Canadians.

“This man has to find out. So he finds a house on the other side of the trees that line the highway — and he goes up to the door and asks the folks if they know anything about the happy sign. And the man at the door welcomes him in and says yes, yes, he made the sign.”

And this is why he made the sign: Because he was sitting there every day in his house, sitting there in a darkened bedroom with his young wife who was terminal, sitting there watching her every day as she lay there waiting to die. And one day when he really couldn’t take it anymore, he painted up that sign and stuck it out by the road. Because, he said — I reach for the book again, to find the right page, to get the words right: “I just wanted people in their cars not to take this moment for granted. This special, never-again-to-be-repeated moment with the ones they care for most should be savored and they should be aware of the happiness in the moment.”^b

I look around at all their faces ringing the table, the jewel of them slipping around me in this space. Light’s falling across the table. Hope’s one strand of loose hair is its own gold. Something inside me trumpets loud and long.

I can only whisper the end of the story.

At first, after the man had put out the sign, there was only a honk here and there, and his dying wife asked what that was about and the husband explained how he’d put the sign out there and after a few days there was more and more honking. And the husband said that the honking …

I look down again at the book but everything’s blurring. Finally the line surfaces.

It was literally all around her.

So much light’s falling across the table.

“I’m thinking it will look best in that doorway.”

The Farmer winks.

And when the Farmer heads out to the shop after lunch, I call after him — Remember to bring in a screwdriver so we can hang the horn!

And he waves back to me as he runs across the farmyard. And when I’m standing in the kitchen wiping off the counters, I hear it clear, from the farm pickup parked out in the laneway, out by the shop: Honk! Honk! Honk!

I laugh. He’s out there honking the horn of his truck!

I turn to the window, laughing … He’s happy! Happy …

And I reach for my pen atop my open gratitude journal there on the counter. “Honk if you’re happy” is really “to be happy, honk.”

And “give thanks if you are joy-filled” is really “to be joy-filled, give thanks.”

And I write it down. “The Farmer honking a horn — and that grin of his.”

This has become like medicine to me.

Shalom waves to the Farmer from the window. He’s waving back at her. She sings the words quiet to him, “Honk if you’re happy!” — and she knows he can’t hear.

But all the world is heaven’s clarion and even in the dark, we are surrounded by it, all the happiness of the world, and I keep the journal close, the thanks ready.

Because literally — it was all around her.

Thank You, God, for the horns You place in my life every day — the chances to honk and be happy. Show me more! And if a joy-filled heart is good medicine, then giving thanks is my daily prescription. Lord, You make all this world heaven’s clarion and even in the dark I am surrounded by it and let me do it a thousand times today — offer honking thanks up to Your throne — joy ringing through all the earth and me!