Closing the Gaps

The way I see it, closing gaps is part of human nature. From earliest peoples’ first muttered words to NASA’s explorations beyond our world, we humans are always striving to understand what is outside ourselves. Maybe we sense that God-given clues to our great mysteries already exist and are just lying in wait for inspired people to piece them together.

Aren’t the mysteries of this world amazing?

A spirit greater than our own compels us to seek and nurture the real ‘ties that bind’ so that our struggles—society’s scariest fears, alienations, ethnic conflicts, and religious divisions—can fade into the distance. Each discovery brings us closer to one another and to life, itself.

The most incredible part of the process is that closing the gaps is an expression of the Divine. It is present in a first handshake with a new acquaintance, a familiar greeting from an old friend, and a comforting call from a loved one when there’s trouble.

Remember the old gospel tune: “This little light of mine, I’m going to let it shine”? Those simple, direct words were originally meant for children, but the song’s profound message also made it a frequent anthem at civil rights marches of the 1950s and ’60s.

Its roots reach back to Jesus’ advice that followers not light their oil lamp only to “put it under a bushel, but on a stand, and it gives its light to all in the house.” (Mt. 5:15)

Simple as it sounds, the way to meet any challenge is to shine your own light — the love, joy, peace, confidence — that glows inside your spiritual being.

It’s easy enough to do, sometimes. At other times it feels impossible, especially when the darkness of doubt looms large.

When God first calls Moses to lead the people of Israel to freedom, Moses’ response is: “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the sons of Israel out of Egypt?” (Ex. 3:11) God answers: “But I will be with you.” (Ex.3:12)

“Keep one thing forever in view—the truth; and if you do this, though it may seem to lead you away from the opinions of men, it will assuredly conduct you to the throne of God.” — Horace Mann

I wonder if we humans might sometimes seem a little strange to God. We fret so much and feel ourselves to be tangled in fear and hopelessness. But God always sees The Truth—that our innate qualities are actually love and confidence.

Recognizing God’s Truth sometimes requires us to step out of character and do the unexpected. A few years ago, a 92-year-old lady in our community earned her masters degree in English. Many people were amazed and delighted she had achieved such a feat—“at her age,” they said. Some, including several family members, thought she was being foolish. Others criticized her thinking as unbecoming for a senior citizen.

But she stood by the Truth of God in her life.

Service: A Path to the Source

In the summer of her 16th year, my niece confronted a problem that baffles most young job seekers: You need experience to get a job, and you can’t get experience without one.

When she wasn’t hired, she reluctantly settled on volunteering at the nearby hospital. Just three weeks later, her supervisor offered her a position. I remember her excitement as she told me,

“They’re actually going to pay me for doing the very things I’m volunteering for!” If confidence were a blue-chip stock, her net worth would have doubled on the spot.

Her discovery about the value of unpaid service is classic, as ancient yet as fresh as a rose spreading its fragrance. By serving humbly, we discover that our gifts of time and energy are returned to us, many fold, from a supply that can never be drained.

Do you ever think about the societies that lived long before our own? The ancient cave painters at Lascaux, for example. Or the Greeks who bequeathed to the world the concept of democracy, or the Incans who left behind the mysteries of Machu Picchu.

Next to long histories like those, the story of our United States as a nation covers just a blip in time. We’re mere newcomers by comparison.

But that’s not the whole story. In the larger picture, we carry the wisdom of all people who lived before us—the ancestors from our own lands as well as those from far away.

Our entire world, in fact, is the offspring of a universe of great patience, one that nurtures us in an environment that provides the seedbed for life.

On a smaller scale, the same story plays out in our countryside every spring. This time of year, signs abound of the careful nurturing of another growing season. At Longhorn Feed and Seed, on North Houston Rosslyn Road, customers ponder the weather and seed and fertilizer. They know that farming is a long-term business.

Outside the Language

A long time ago in a hospital elevator, I overheard three people speaking intensely in a language I did not recognize. Their acute sadness was easy to feel, even though I didn’t understanding their words.

I wanted to offer my support but the lack of a common language sidelined me, made me unable to share thoughts or ask questions. With no way to communicate, I felt like an interloper—a self-conscious intruder standing mutely in the midst of their crisis.

So intense was that experience that I still ponder its meaning today.

Could it be that each of us communicates in a language no one else truly”gets”? And that we are surrounded by friends, family, co-workers, and strangers trying to talk with us—maybe even crying for our help—in words we cannot comprehend? Any parent (or grandparent) of a teenager knows this is true, at least on some levels.

Remember this story? An elderly couple was passed by a car appearing to carry just its driver until it got close. Amused to realize two young people were snuggled so closely, the elderly gentleman chuckled, “Would you look at that!”

“We used to snuggle in the car, you know,” his wife reminded him. The gentleman thought a moment, then whispered to his spouse, “I haven’t moved.”

It’s amazing how many human problems are really about relationships.

Wherever you look, it is not the solitary, individual aspects that command the most attention. It’s the liaisons, alliances, leagues, factions, associations, mergers, treaties, and unions that cause the mightiest issues.

It may be that nothing exists individually, all by itself, and that aspects appearing individually are actually constellations of relationships.

Look up at the clear night sky and you will be overwhelmed less by individual stars than by the grandeur of galaxies. The atoms in your computer are not individuals, at their very core, but teams of subatomic particles that share an affinity for one another. In other words, they are bands of relationships.

After a long day, afternoon traffic speeds before me into the growing dusk as my fellow commuters and I drive home in this holiday season. Stopped at a light, I reflect: Aren’t we always trying to find the way “home?”

The idea is embedded in our souls. Home is where the real chicken soup is. With reverence, we journey to the homes of our childhood. Norman Rockwell’s paintings – our iconic images of the American dream – hold out the promise of peace, security, and love of home.

A promised new home in America has beckoned generations of “homeless, tempest-tossed” immigrants. In America’s pastime, baseball, the high point is the run to home plate. Even trained pigeons and Lassie always come home.

A promised new home in America has beckoned generations of “homeless, tempest-tossed” immigrants. In America’s pastime, baseball, the high point is the run to home plate.

Few of us live lives intimately connected with the earth and its circle of seasons the ways our ancestors did. But even in these modern times, the agrarian calendar remains deeply embedded in our consciousness and culture.

Thanksgiving, for me, is a special time to reflect on these roots.

The holiday honors the season that farmers gathered crops and stored the food that would carry their communities through the uncertainties of winter. This was when they processed the harvest and sorted its seeds for future planting. It was when they gave thanks for the abundance their nurturing had produced.

And it was this season, more than any other, that invited our forbearers to draw faith in the cycles of life on the land and to be certain of their place in them.

The Bible gives us many images of planting and harvesting.

Jesus said: “If you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there, and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you.’”

Your Special Power

Would you do something today? Take a moment – even if just a brief pause – to consider the power of gratitude. Doing so is far more important that most people imagine. And it’s easier, too.

A well-developed sense of gratitude focuses on the present while it releases the past and entrusts the future to God. Being grateful for the goodness expressed in our lives today is a choice, a decision we can each make.

Never try to withhold gratitude until everything is OK in our lives and in the world, or until some personal goal is met. That’s a stage unlikely ever to be reached.

Instead, work on developing a “muscle” of gratitude for life as it is now, rough spots and all – just as you would exercise any other muscle.

A clear way to start is to make lists of the good people, wonderful things, and fortunate circumstances in your life.

Consider gratitude to be like a light in the dark. Flipping a light switch doesn’t add new things to your world. It only illuminates what’s already there.

Emergence

For months, a tedious stop-and-go drive to work frustrated my friend Jim. Then one day his CD player beckoned, and it wasn’t long before Jim’s perception started to change.

Instead of dreading that long commute now, he finds himself looking forward to his favorite music and inspirational recordings.

His blood pressure dropped and his work performance even improved, all because Jim turned his immediate environment into a playground — just as philosopher Eric Hoffer described: “It is the child in man that is the source of his uniqueness and creativeness, and the playground is the optimal setting for the unfolding of his capacities and talents.”

Jim puts it his own way: “Stop seeing the journey as empty. Instead, have fun on the road.”

If you want new things to happen for you, then try putting your world together in a new way. It is eye opening how much a new arrangement of existing elements can transform everyday life.

TIME ENOUGH

In response to last week’s column, “Un-Stress,” a reader emailed: “But I don’t have time enough to be I the present moment. Help?”

Maybe you can identify with that reader’s dilemma. It’s how I felt until I made an important discovery about myself: Finding “time enough” would require me to develop patience.

Before that realization, I was always anxious about some long to-do list that pushed me to rush, loose patience with circumstances, view people’s needs (including my own) as impediments to progress.

And the prize for actually completing one of my numerous to-do lists? Nothing more than another to-do list, with its own set of urgent-seeming tasks.

This way of setting priorities kept me always looking ahead, feeling frustrated that I never fully accomplished my goals.