Last Sunday, a lady at a ministry table at church gave Abby a red helium balloon. We attached a 7 foot long string to it, and Abby carried it around all afternoon, bouncing it off the ceiling like she was dribbling a basketball in zero gravity. She loved it.
But rubber balloons aren’t particularly good at keeping the inside in and the outside out. The helium slowly leeched out overnight. By morning, the balloon only had enough buoyancy to float a foot or two of the yarn. It hovered pitifully above the floor.
Abby was excited to see the balloon again when she woke up, but quickly became concerned. “Ut-oh…Up in the air! Up in the air” she encouraged, as she tried desperately to loft the balloon.
Alas, entropy
You want your daughter to be happy, you want things to always be perfect for her. You hate seeing disappointment. It was such a wonderful balloon, so different than those things bound to the earth by the pull of gravity. But now it’s broken. And it’s not the only thing. Life will be filled with expectations that fall short, promises that are broken, opportunities that evaporate, and dreams that are shattered. As much as I’d like to run out to the store and buy another helium balloon, I know that the next one will deflate too. Best get used to it, little girl. In the meantime, I’ll pray that balloons are the most of your problems, because this world can be a whole lot worse than that.
I’ve also been thinking a lot about weight and buoyancy, but I decided that wasn’t depressing enough to write about.
Yes such is life. I remember a boy who got just such a ball on while at the Bronx zoo. He made it all the way back to the car holding it,keeping it safe, but just as the car door opened and the boy tried to put the balloon inside, it somehow escaped. The boy wished it would come back but that’s not the way it works. Instead he watched it rise to the clouds and kept watching until it finally disappeared. Then the boy started to wonder what would happen to the balloon. He created several scenarios while driving home. In the end he decided that what happened was the next best thing to him still having that balloon. We should all be so lucky.