Dig a Pit for Thy Neighbor

This story was from when my Dad was a young man.  He took the scripture "dig a pit for thy neighbor; there is no harm in this" (2 Nephi 28:8) literally, and learned what Nephi was trying to teach: this logic doesn't hold before God.  When he was growing up his back yard connected with the back yard of old mean Mrs. Paxman.  She was the type to watch what those meddlesome boys were up to and report it to their mother.  What my father and his brothers were up to was digging a pit.  Between the back yards (in the day when people didn't build so many fences around their property) there was a path, and my dad knew the neighbor kid took that path to get to school in the morning.

Why dig a pit for him to fall into?  Because it's funny, because it's there.  Because when we are young it seems like teasing others is harmless.  Only later do we learn that teasing will always cost us something in the end.  I wish I could tell a younger version of myself to not tease.  You cannot aim at another person without hitting yourself.

My father and his brothers dig a wonderful hole, several feet deep, and covered it over.  Unfortunately it made the smooth path look unusual.   Someone (my father claims it was his brother.  My brother blames my father) had the genius idea to build a second pit next to the first.  That way when the neighbor kid went around the obvious pit he would fall into the second.  When twilight began to fall they retired to their home.   Mrs. Paxman came out to see what those boys had been up to all afternoon.  She saw the first pit and moved around it.  She didn't see the second until she had fallen in.

She broke her leg.  Apparently the crawl home was painful, and the recovery long.  The boys were sent out to fill in their pits.  The interesting thing is that I believe my father still feels bad about the incident.  He and his brothers had no intention of harming the lady, and once it was done there was no way to magically fix the leg.  To hear my father talk about something that happened 40 years earlier, and see that he still feels sad makes me think twice about what I am doing.  40 years later will I want to look back on today and feel shame?  What do I want to say at the end of my life?  I hope to echo Paul, "I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith" (2 Timothy 4:7).  My father made a mistake, but perhaps the lesson can help me prevent a few of my own.