The store was quiet. Nobody was behind me in the checkout line. Nobody was in any particular hurry – not me, not the cashier (a middle-aged woman with a broad, attractive, friendly face), not the young father who had just bought his solemn, sturdy two-year-old son a tiny hockey stick. Cashier and I were admiring the baby while father beamed happily, proud as punch. Cashier said to papa, smiling, "Enjoy him. Always enjoy him. That's the one important thing."

As father trundled his kid out, the cashier started ringing in my purchases. I said (as one does when there's no one waiting in line and no particular hurry) "You have kids?" She said in her gentle voice, "I have two. I had three, but one died." I made the appropriate noises, and she told me a little, plainly and unemphatically. Ten years back, her 19-year-old, out on his motorcycle, had made the sort of mistake that shouldn't be serious but was. There was a truck in the wrong place. Her son died instantly, of massive injuries.

I said what needed to be said – that I could not possibly imagine how awful a thing this had been, the worst thing in the world. I can't imagine losing one of my kids. She smiled softly and said, "Just enjoy them. Enjoy every minute you have with them. That's what I learned." Her other two kids are grown and married now, and while we packed my things, we talked a little about her grandchildren, whom she clearly adores.

Some events are crucial to a life; they are the grit around which we form whatever – pearl or abscess. These events may be major, like this woman's loss, or a war, or a serious illness or injury. Or they may seem minor: staring down a lane into the woods, dealing with a school bully, a friend's betrayal, a moment of clear anger. Sometimes we can't see what's happening are at the time – how important some small event was. And sometimes whatever-it-is feels so overwhelming that we fear it will swamp us altogether.

This woman had been given such a horrible piece of big, painful, grit, her child's death – it doesn't get worse than that. Her face was calm and her voice was soft and even, but I didn't think for a second that she hadn't been through hell and back. And from what I could see, what she'd made of her experience it was to extend her love to all children – you should have seen her face as she looked at that child, the shine in it. People can make such good even of the Big Horrible Stuff, if they choose to do that. And people can obsess so angrily about the smallest imagined slights, if they choose to do that. What lies at the heart of the pearl can be so big and painful; what lurks in the throbbing messy abscess can be the tiniest bit of a splinter.

Was talking about similar matters with a young friend, who is going through the Horribles at school. I don't think God protects us from the consequences of biology, physics, or free will, and free will, as exercised by a bunch of thugs, was doing a real number on this kid. He is a Christian, and he had prayed and prayed for the bullying to stop, and it wasn't stopping. It shakes his faith in God: what's a God who doesn't answer prayer?

What faith does, I think, isn't to protect us from the Horribles; they are part of this life, and we are going to have to deal with them. What faith does to is to give us the ability to make something of them – and to let God help us to make something of ourselves. I have no idea if the cashier is a Christian. I know nothing about her faith, if she has any. I can only say that, from what little I saw, she had handled her son's death as a Christian should. She had neither forgotten it nor let it possess her, going on loving him, still missing him, doing her grief as grief requires, grieving still sometimes--but letting that Something that we call God's grace transform her loss, so that love could glow from her to warm a stranger's child.

It's a mystery to me why some people can manage this transforming act, while others – good people, loving people – can't. I've had the odd abscess myself, enough to hold me back from being too judgmental. We're born as distinct souls; we get more or less good nurturing; we have positive or negative experiences. We're complex items, stubbornly incomprehensible even to ourselves. I know how it feels to have a splinter under my skin, to be ashamed of my own inability to let go and move on. How can I possibly judge?

But I can see a pearl and praise it when I see it; and this woman had held one out to me, a great pearl modestly cupped in her broad worn hand. I left the store feeling oddly graced, and that grace stays with me when I think back to that moment. There had been in that interchange something decent and civil and kindly. I had that sense that this is how things ought to be. Such good can come when we feel free to share our stories, holding out this gift in modesty, not narcissism, forming that brief deep connection, exchanging for a moment – however brief--God's true love with the warm human skin on it.