Columnist Susan Snyder: Hardship puts what we have in perspective

Thursday, Dec. 23, 2004 | 8:18 a.m.

Forget what Mother says. Talk to strangers.

The woman standing next to me at the bagel shop's coffee bar a couple of Sundays ago was about my age, but that was where our similarities seemed to end.

I wore bicycling clothes and a baseball cap. She wore a black-and-pink pantsuit that was stunning. And I told her so.

She thanked me then added, "We ride bicycles on this side of town too. But on Sundays we go to church."

Where?

"Spring Valley Baptist," she said. "And it was just the best sermon this morning."

Her eyes shone. She meant it.

We all have encountered people who wear religion like a badge, wield it as a weapon or hawk it as an infomercial.

But this wasn't like any of that. She was moved, and I was convenient.

Her preacher had recalled for his congregation that morning a childhood Christmas that his alcoholic parents had promised would be the best ever. When the preacher awoke Christmas morning he found his folks passed out on the living room floor.

"But he told us not to feel sorry for him because he had been truly blessed," the woman said, shaking her head in amazement.

We added lids to our coffees-to-go and went our separate ways.

I quietly thought about the encounter as my friends and I munched the treats we'd earned on our bike ride. That preacher probably is lucky -- not for what he has now but for what his parents showed him back then.

This is not to say that a child who grows up with abusive parents has it good. That's ridiculous. But hardship lends a different yardstick with which to measure life.

Anyone who has survived a car crash, cancer, past abuses or any of life's other innumerable tribulations will be the first to say that subsequent pleasures taste sweeter.

These people have more to celebrate and look forward to every day than those of us for whom life is easy, secure and safe. It's hard to see joy in the daily ritual when you never have had to live without it.

We know this instinctively. It's what draws people to ski beyond the lift boundaries or run 100-mile races across Death Valley in summer. It's what pulls people to the top of the Stratosphere to ride the Big Shot or X Scream.

We long to cheat death, if only a little bit. Safe is boring because it requires nothing of us.

We don't have to relish today as if there is no tomorrow. We don't have to believe in anything we can't see. We don't need faith or magic or hope. Christmas becomes another round of social obligations.

At the closing of a year in which faith was used as a political wedge to divide and conquer, it was interesting to discover how much the woman in black and I actually had in common.

Turns out we'd both been to church that morning.

My fellow worshipers sat in the glorious morning sun sharing coffee and laughs in the joyful aftermath of a simple bike ride. We were sweaty, rumpled and grateful for the opportunity to have sore muscles and good friends.

I laughed with them and thought about the sticker affixed to my bike helmet.

"I like the pain," it says. "What's your excuse?"