Whether a surprise visit is good or bad depends on the kind of people who show up at your doorstep, I’m convinced.
Sometimes it’s not good, like when Ernest T. Bass, the comical but annoying mountain ruffian, shows up to disrupt the sleepy town of Mayberry, once again. Andy warily acknowledges Ernest T.’s arrival, and Ernest cackles, “Surprise, surprise! I can see it in your eyes.” Andy scowls and rolls his eyes.
You know what it’s like when you see that person’s car in your driveway or standing at the door of your office. You want to close the shades and hide under the bed. My older brother, Mark, actually tried that unsuccessfully on one occasion when we were kids. “Quick, tell him I’m not here,” Mark begged me, in a panicked voice, ducking under the bed in my room. The guest stood there before me, asking me where my brother was. I got nervous and caved. I couldn’t lie. “Maybe he’s under the bed,” I stammered.
“What are you doing under the bed?” he asked my brother.
“Oh, just down here looking for stuff,” Mark sheepishly said.
But not all surprise visits are bad either, even if you don’t recognize it at first. An angel of the Lord visited the aged Sarah and announced that she would have a baby. It sounded so impossible that Sarah laughed, and as the story unfolds, we find out that they named the miracle baby after that event where Sarah laughed, for the name Isaac, means “laughter.”
And when Jesus arrived in Jericho, the wee, little Zacchaeus almost fell out of the tree he had climbed, trying to catch a glimpse of the miracle worker. Luke tells us that Jesus “looked up and said to him, ‘Zacchaeus, hurry and come down because today I must stay at your house’” (Luke 19:5).
One of the more astonishing visits among the Biblical stories is when the angel, Gabriel, announced to Zechariah that his wife would have a baby. Zechariah didn’t fall out of a tree, but the visit left him speechless until Elizabeth gave birth to John.
Of course, the most miraculous surprise visit of all was the one the angel, Gabriel, made to the Virgin Mary, telling her she would bear the Messiah.
My little surprise visit the other day was bland compared to those Biblical stories.
But a simple visit can be a joyous one when the right people show up.
“You want to ride to Bardstown with me?” asked our daughter, Madi, when she called Lori early one morning. “We’ll pick you up.” The “we” meant Emmie, our granddaughter, would be with Madi. And that meant I would come down from my study upstairs and take a break from my work.
My five-year-old granddaughter has yet to turn down my offer of fried eggs and “pop-pop toast,” which is simply top-browned oven-toast her older brother named after me. If I’m going to make breakfast for her, I might as well make it for Lori and Madi, too. It takes longer when Emmie wants to help me break the eggs and butter the toast, but it’s more fun. If my breakfast were on the menu at Cracker Barrel, it would be named “Pop-Pop’s Plain and Simple Breakfast,” guaranteed to bore the average customer, but at my house, for Emmie, Madi, and Lori—it’s just right.
I sipped my coffee, smiling as I watched them enjoying their breakfast, shaking my head when Emmie raised her index figure, putting in her request to me for “one more slice of pop-pop toast, please.”
Watching them drive away, I felt happy inside. Like my breakfast, the visit had been plain and simple. And, plain and simple is just fine when it’s with the right people.
And that means I don’t need to hide under the bed.