My friend Rita was home from college and went to visit her elderly grandmother.

Noticing a messy kitchen, she got busy cleaning up by opening the dishwasher door and emptying it, walking around the kitchen putting things away.

That's when Grandma walked in, not noticing the open dishwasher door, tripping over it, falling to the ground, and getting ambulanced to the hospital with a very serious head injury.

Already a bit crotchety, Grandma immediately heaped blame on Rita, scolding her and telling family members it was all her fault. Family attitudes toward Rita got even worse when Grandma died of that head injury.

Confused, ostracized, and broken, Rita came looking for answers. And the place we began was with her. Rita was traumatized. This series of events had carved an impression in her brain, and created very sticky images she couldn't get away from - that continuously told her she was a careless, reckless, person and unworthy of living because she had taken another life.

We got Rita a therapist. And we came around her with words of truth to combat the negativity, assuring her that she was a good person and that she did well not to define herself by the worst thing she'd ever done.

In this Sunday's Gospel Jesus takes up a similar issue when he's asked, 'Why do deadly, random accidents happen? Who's to blame? God? Us? Someone else?'

And like Rita's friends, Jesus doesn't start there, instead, Jesus starts with them. We can't change what happened and we don't know how it did. What we can do is change ourselves - working to heal ourselves. Events like this can be used for transformation. We can take steps to minimize the damage and reverse the Negativity Train that seeks to shatter us and flatten us.

The suffering that surrounds us - from personal trauma, to COVID, to the war in Ukraine, we are all affected, some of us are traumatized. How are we tending to that? Are we taking our roundedness seriously? How well are we listening to ourselves - treating ourselves - and what does that look like?  How are we being invited to use these occasions to do God's healing work in the world - and in ourselves?