The Random Thoughts of Henry Holloway
The other week I had occasion to travel down to the South of Ireland. On my way across the city of Dublin a man suddenly stepped out in front of me. ‘Excuse me, sir,’ said he. I wondered for a moment whether he had decided that I was an intruder from the North, though, truth to tell, I was wearing a good dark green tie. Not that I was trying to obey the old saying: ‘When in Rome do as Rome does.’ It just happens that I like the Boy Scout tie, which is green.
Without any further explanation the good man crossed in front of me and kicked away a banana skin into the roadway. Then he waxed eloquent about the people who throw fruit skins on the footpath. ‘I see them often,’ said he, ‘buying fruit at the barrows and then, without thinking about other people, they just throw the skin anywhere. First thing you know somebody comes along and there’s a broken leg.’ When I began to speak, he looked at me rather quizzically - how these accents of ours give us away! My parting word to him was, ‘Well, it is a good thing to go through life taking away the things that hurt people and tend to make them slip.’ ‘God rest ye kindly, sir’ said he and we parted on that friendly benediction.
One of the great American motor car firms used to have on its staff a man bent with age. He wandered about the works all day and certainly did not give the impression that he was one of the most important men about the place. Actually he was, because he saved the company every day more than a dozen times his wages. All day long he wandered about at will, along the roadways and round about the workshops, his eyes almost always on the ground. The other workmen called him, ‘Magnet Bill’ because his only tool was a magnet at the end of a long handle.
Magnet Bill’s duty was to remove from the roadways every nail and every bit of iron or other metal that might puncture a tyre. It was reckoned that without the work done by this one man in removing dangerous objects from the road the damage done to car tyres would have been enormous. It pays, in business, to remove every possible cause of trouble or danger.
Lord Fisher, the famous, First Lord of the Admiralty, had a gift for pungent phrases, and on one occasion he dropped the remark, ‘Life is strewn with orange peel.’
Banana skin or orange peel, it makes no difference, they are both dangerous on the pathway. And in life there are many temptations that tend to make us slip. It is a good thing, as Paul says, not to put a stumbling-block or an occasion of falling in our brothers way. It is good too, as Isaiah put it, to take up the stumbling-block out of the way of people. But it is better still to have the confident assurance of the Psalmist who said, ‘Never will He let you slip.’
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