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BYU Studies Quarterly

BYU Studies Quarterly

Robbie Taggart

Keywords

grace, BYU Studies

Abstract

One day when I was a snarling baffled holy teenager, four friends and I found a lonely-looking couch on the side of the road. It had a sign on it that said, “Free.” Our minds immediately began to scroll through the brilliant possibilities presented by such a couch, such a gift. Someone thought we could hike it to our favorite camping spot up the mountain and sit upon it amid the trees and weeds and clouds and birdsong and rejoice in the incongruity of it all. But the thought of mountain snails and mildew sharing our couch led us in different directions. We thought of hiking it up to the top of some cliff and hurling it off like an enormous brown baby bird that hasn’t yet learned the art of flight. Someone wisely interjected that we might perhaps unwittingly hit some unsuspecting hiker and spend the rest of our adolescence behind bars. Which was remarkable wisdom if you stop to consider that there wasn’t a fully developed prefrontal cortex among us. Finally, someone suggested driving it down by the lake, slicing it up with knives, dousing it in gasoline and setting it on fire. Of course, the sense and beauty of this idea descended on all of us in unison, like a shared revelation. Burning a couch and taking a baseball bat to a toilet were two dreams that had long been high on my bucket list, and here was a golden opportunity shining before our very faces. We borrowed my mother’s minivan, emptied it of the back seats, loaded the couch, and drove down toward the marshy land near the lake.

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