A Small Good Thing at a Time Like This
By Rebecca Bowman Woods
Rebecca Bowman Woods is a Cincinnati, Ohio-based freelance writer and news editor of DisciplesWorld magazine.

“No peace without justice. No justice without forgiveness.” Driving past a nearby Roman Catholic Church, the saying on the sign out front caught my attention. I’d heard the first part of the saying before, but the second part was new. I went home and wrote it down in my notebook so I’d remember it.

A few weeks later, I read Raymond Carver’s short story, “A Small Good Thing.” Carver’s story opens with a woman stopping by a bakery to order a birthday cake with her son’s name on it. She tells the baker she’ll be back to pick up the cake on Monday, her son Scotty’s eighth birthday. Unfortunately, on Monday morning, Scotty is hit by a car while walking to school. His parents (Carver never reveals their names) spend the next few days at the hospital; all birthday plans forgotten, including the special cake. The doctor tells them that Scotty is just in a deep sleep from shock, but he slips into a coma and dies a few days later.

The baker, knowing nothing about the accident, assumes Scotty’s mother simply forgot to pick up the cake he spent hours decorating. During the days following the accident, he makes several harassing phone calls to the couple’s home. Sometimes he hangs up without speaking. Other times, he asks, “did you forget about Scotty?” before hanging up. Numb with grief, Scotty’s parents have no idea who the caller is. Then, the night they return from the hospital for the last time, the woman realizes it’s the baker calling, angry because of the forgotten cake. Her grief turns to rage, and she convinces her husband to drive her to the bakery in the middle of the night to confront the baker.

When they arrive, the baker is working inside. They bang on the back door until he answers. The woman screams at him, telling him their son is dead, and as her rage turns back into grief, she collapses, sobbing.

The baker is immediately remorseful, and fumbles toward an apology. “I don’t know how to act any more,” he tells them. Noticing how tired they look, he invites them to sit down, and serves them coffee, along with his best hot cinnamon rolls. “Eating is a small good thing in a time like this,” he tells them. While they eat, he opens up to them about his own disappointments; how he always had wanted a child but had never married. The story ends with the three, together at the table, talking until morning.

Carver, a writer known more for stark realism than religious themes, could easily have ended his story with the confrontation, followed by the baker sitting alone at the table, feeling ashamed, while the vindicated couple drive away, momentarily satisfied. That kind of ending would seem fair, wouldn’t it?

But Carver’s story takes a different turn. Somehow, in that awkward moment after his apology, the baker makes a simple invitation. Somehow, numb with grief and exhausted, the couple simply accepts it. There around the table, all pretenses gone, they share a moment of common brokenness and healing, of forgiveness and reconciliation.

In his second letter to the Corinthians, chapter 5, verses 18 and 19, Paul writes of God’s desire for reconciliation, expressed through the gift of Jesus Christ. “All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation:” and the point is important enough that he rephrases it in the next verse, “that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.”

What then, of our human definitions of right and wrong, fair and unfair? Shouldn’t everyone, like Carver’s baker, know that their actions carry consequences?

As Christians, or as Paul puts it a few verses later, as “Christ’s ambassadors,” the story that defines us is the greatest reconciliation story of all time. I believe that God is counting on us to find those moments in our own lives when we can sow the seeds of reconciliation, instead of turning away too quickly and settling for “fairness,” giving and getting “what we deserve” from others. Difficult to do, I know.

No peace without justice. No justice without forgiveness. Amen.

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