Why do bad things happen to good pickles?

Last year I quit my job so I could devote myself fully to being the Community Pastor at our church. It was a great decision but like any great decision, there are trade-offs. We've had to make a few lifestyle adjustments as our income has dropped. This has meant many things. The first of these ancillary comforts to go was my YMCA membership. Sometimes a person, moved by faith, has to lay their ripped abdominals at the foot of the cross and give up temporal buffedness for the hope of bigger biceps at the resurrection. I wish I could say that giving up the YMCA membership was difficult but in reality it meant that I had a couple extra hours for watching Man vs. Wild and The Deadliest Catch each week.

And then something far worse happened - my cable TV was dropped. I cried out to the Lord, "Why would a benevolent deity take away my Pawn Stars and Ace of Cakes?" But that wasn't the end of the fiscal responsibility measures. I was informed by my wife, "There will be no more going out to eat unless someone is born, someone dies or someone is willing to keep the thermostat at 55 for the next three weeks." And the slash and burn continued. We had to cut back on gift giving - I actually gave a guy a meatloaf for his birthday a few weeks ago. We stopped buying paper towels, going to first run movies and going on coffee dates. Along with these small "sacrifices," my lovely wife placed a moratorium on the purchase of all non-essential food items. There are a ton of things in everyone's fridge that are non-essentials that they take for granted on an everyday basis. Let me give you an example: hot sauce. For the last six months I have gone without my Louisiana Hot Sauce and it has been a bland existence. Olives, wax peppers, bacon, garlic, to name a few, are non-essential food items. But the one item that impacted me greatest was the pickles - those briny submersibles of cucumbery concupiscence. I love kosher dills like Charleton Heston loved firearms, if you want to take my pickles away, you'll have to pry them out of my cold dead hands. But not wanting to cross my better half, I gave up the green denisons of the salton sea in order to avoid a fate worse than death, an unhappy wife.

Last week, we went to a new grocery store where they sold pickles in a 2 gallon jar for the meager sum of 4 dollars and 19 cents. I looked at the jar with the smiling cartoon stork with the funny hat, then looked back at my wife with a pouty face and she nodded. And for the first time in the new year, pickles were placed into the cart. A half hour later, I was unloading the groceries from the back of my truck. The last to go - the pickles. Now, I'm not sure what 15 year old bagger decided to place a 2 gallon glass jar of pickles in a single plastic grocery bag, but when I picked up the bag, the entire jar of pickles jumped through the bottom and smashed onto the concrete slab behind my house. Glass and Pickles intermingled in an unholy puddle at my feet, the plastic bag still firmly in my right hand with nothing in it. Pickle juice was on my feet and on my pant legs. For about thirty seconds, I just stood there - the smell of salt and capers wafting up from the glassy mess. "Maybe I could wash them off," I reasoned in my madness. "Maybe I could eat just one." But they had all been impacted by the fall. And then a theological truth ran through my head. I couldn't know why this all occurred. Maybe sometimes bad things just happen to good pickles and there isn't any real explanation for it.