Why I got a tattoo
June 29, 2010 by Katdish · 44 Comments
The first rule I ever remember learning was maybe the most important—always keep your promises. The reasoning behind that rule was basic. In the end, all a man has is his word. If we say we’re going to do something, we’d better do it. Simple as that.
I’ve done my best to fulfill my promises over the years. I’ve succeeded most times. Failed some, too. Others have had to be put on hold until the circumstances were right. One of those promises was one I made to myself, one that had been put on hold for seven years. I was determined to keep that promise. Last Saturday, I did just that.
I got a tattoo.
I realize that may sound a little ridiculous. Childish, even. I assure you that neither applies in this situation. My tattoo was serious business, the product of much thought and introspection. It wasn’t done on a whim, and it isn’t, as Jimmy Buffett so eloquently put it, “A permanent reminder of a temporary feeling.”
When I first sat down to write Snow Day, I did so with two thoughts in mind. One was that if it was good enough, it would get published one day. The other was that it could very well give a lot of people what I was so lacking at the time, and that was a sense of hope in their lives.
The odds of getting a book published were not lost to me. I knew what I was getting into and what would be involved. So I promised myself that if I managed to hang on and if God just so happened to smile upon me, I’d get a tattoo.
It’s easy to lose chapters in the story of your life, easy to let the ones already written slip away and into the wind while you’re writing the here and now. I didn’t want that. I wanted to make sure that didn’t happen.
And I didn’t want a run of the mill tattoo, either. I wanted something unique to me. Something that told my own story.
I wanted a Native American feel, since they’re in both my blood and my family tree. To the Native Americans, every person has their own totem, an animal that acts as a protector and guide through physical and spiritual worlds. Knowing your totem is an innate process, they say, and a sacred one. Though my own beliefs don’t really allow room for spirit guides, I’ve always been drawn to wolves. To the Native Americans, wolves were the pathfinders, the protectors of wisdom and tribe. Loyal and strong and independent. Always watching. At home in the mountains and the wild places.
If God would have made me as an animal, it would have been a wolf.
I wanted a reminder of those long years spent trying and failing, too. I didn’t ever want to forget the faith I found or even the doubts I had, as both served to make me a better man. Our hopes and dreams don’t nearly define us as much as the manner by which we journey toward them. I needed to make sure I could remember that. Which is the reason for the designs around the wolf. Each design represents a year I spent waiting to get published. The small ones are years that went by quickly, when hope was abundant and doubt was hiding. The long ones are the years when I almost gave up.
There are a lot of long ones.
One question has been asked the most—did it hurt? My answer has usually been given in typical Country Boy fashion—“It didn’t tickle.” The truth is that it hurt. The truth is also that I was looking forward to that hurt, because much of the last six years hasn’t tickled, either.
I got a lot of thinking done during the two and a half hours I spent with an electric needle punching me in the arm (the tip of which, appropriately enough, looked much like the nib of a fountain pen). I allowed myself to remember. Everything. The places I’ve been, the people I’ve known, and the blessings I’ve received.
To the artist doing the work, it was just another tattoo.
To me, it was my story.
This post is part of the blog carnival on Strength, hosted by Bridget Chumbley. To read more, please visit her site.
The Little People
June 28, 2010 by Billy Coffey · 7 Comments
image courtesy of photobucket.com
It was easy to understand why the oil spill was on a lot of people’s minds at the beach. Everyone from the lifeguards to the waitresses to the shop owners was talking about it. And since some scientists have stated that the spill could eventually snake itself all the way up to the Virginia coast, I suppose all that pondering was warranted.
There wasn’t much worrying though, at least not from the crowd at the restaurant where we had our breakfast one day. The folks in Virginia Beach are tough, made that way by enduring everything from hurricanes to loved ones in the military being sent to war. Being around them reminded me how lucky I am to be a little person.
That’s right, a little person.
Not famous or rich or powerful, but unknown and getting by and a little fragile.
I wrote about the little people today for katdish. Stop by and hear what I have to say.
Trust me, you’ll be thankful you’re a little person, too.
A writer’s learning curve
June 25, 2010 by Billy Coffey · 39 Comments
image courtesy of photobucket.com
Across the road from my house sits about 30,000 acres of national forest, which is home to all manner of creepy crawlies. The boundary between civilized and not is clearly marked by a nearly straight line of neatly-kept backyards and a foreboding tree line of towering oaks.
Of course, neither man nor beast keeps to his own side. We all mingle with each other from time to time. Miles of trails leading into the mountains provide all a guy like me needs for feed his inner redneck. And as if to even things out a bit, everything from bear to deer to snakes to coyotes have been seen wandering our streets.
Most of us pay little mind to such intrusions, believing that the animals have just as much right to snoop around our homes as we have theirs. But there is one person in particular who is uneasy about the whole thing.
I speak of the kid down the road. Sixteenish and free for the summer. I remember the summer I turned sixteen, three glorious months of getting into more trouble than I’d ever gotten into in my life. Ask his father, and he’ll say he almost wishes his son would get into that same sort of trouble. Not a lot, mind you. But at least a little. After all, he’s sixteen. Trouble’s supposed to find you at that age.
But it hasn’t found him, mostly because he refuses to go outside. His days are spent staring out his bedroom window and writing about what he sees. He wants to write a book, he told his father. He’s serious about it. And while his father is supportive, he also knows it’s an excuse. His son doesn’t like his new home. Doesn’t like the small town or the big woods. He wants to go home to the city.
The family moved here from the city last year as the result of a job transfer. All this wildness suits mom and dad just fine, but not the boy. He woke up one morning in April to find a bear in the backyard. Found a snake on the deck a few weeks later. Though he refuses to admit it, they think it was all just a little too Wild Kingdom for him. So when school let out and he was free to do what he wanted, he retreated to the safety of the indoors.
He says he’s spending his time wisely. He’s writing. Working. There isn’t any time for much of anything else.
I heard about all of this the other night while out for an evening walk. His father was putting up a new mailbox, I stopped to say hello, and things just sort of went from there.
“He really is a good storyteller,” he told me. “Just wish he wouldn’t stay inside all the time. That can’t be healthy, can it?”
No.
Not for a kid. And especially not for a writer.
There are a lot of would-be authors out there who think it’s fine to stare out of their window and write about the world. They take their journey within themselves because they’re unwilling or afraid to go out.
I can’t blame them for that. I was once the kid down the road, too.
Not afraid of bears and snakes, but afraid to go out the door. To face life in all its glory and pain. Give me a nice desk and some paper instead. Let life leave me alone so I could write about it.
Sounds a little strange, doesn’t it? But that’s what I thought. And that’s what a lot of authors think.
There is a learning curve to writing, of course. First come the simple words and simpler thoughts, which through countless hours of practice becomes better words and greater thoughts. No one denies this.
But there is another learning curve to writing that often goes overlooked, and that is the experience of living. Of plunging headlong into life and daring to swim in both the clear and the murky waters, and then using pen and paper as a towel to dry yourself off.
You have to hurt. And suffer. You have to love and hate and believe and doubt. You have to fail and succeed.
And the only way to do that is to go out and live before you come in to write.
Anatomy of a Treasure Hunt
June 23, 2010 by Billy Coffey · 35 Comments
image courtesy of photobucket.com
My daughter brought everything she needed to ensure a good first day at the beach—sunglasses, lotion, goggles, bodyboard, a book, a doll, and flip flops. It took three people to help her get it all from our hotel room to the sand. I felt like a butler.
As if to prove the maxim that less is more, my son’s gear could be carried by him alone. All he required was a pair of swimming trunks and one very stout, very solid, and very plastic shovel.
Embedded within the male DNA are strands specifically designed for one purpose only—to Do Stuff. We like to get dirty and sweaty. To have a goal in mind.
My son’s goal that day was a simple one. He wasn’t going to get in the waves. Not yet, anyway. That had to wait. Because in his very young mind, the mathematics of the situation were simple and twofold.
Beach + sand = pirates, and pirates = treasure.
He offered me a beaten spare shovel and asked if I would join him. I did. Like I said, a guy’s gotta dig a hole when he’s at the beach. So while the females with us began sunning and swimming, we got down to work.
“You sure there’s treasure here?” I asked him.
“Yes.”
“How far do you think we’ll have to dig?”
“That depends,” he said. “Pirates were smart. Maybe we’ll just have to dig a little.” He paused and then added, “But maybe we’ll have to go to China.”
“That might take a while,” I told him.
He answered by digging, and I joined him. We had a pretty decent hole five minutes later, and we’d also worked up a pretty decent sweat.
“Wanna take a break?” I offered. “I bet the ocean feels good.”
“No, Daddy. We have to work first, then we can play.”
Okay, then.
Twenty minutes later. More sweat. Bigger hole. So big, in fact, that it had already caved in twice. Evidently we had begun to reach Pirate depth, because he was now scooping his share of the sand into a yellow strainer and sifting it. The tally was two rocks and four cigarette butts.
“Need to keep looking,” he said. “I know there’s treasure here.”
Twenty more minutes. Our hole had begun to take on impressive proportions, to the point where another team of father and son walked by and offered, “Nice hole.” But still no treasure. And as enamored as I was about a shovel and fresh sand, I was getting bored.
I think he was, too. Or that he sensed it in me. In either case, my son decided to break the routine a little. He started to sing.
It was a medley of songs from Toy Story, Phineas and Ferb, and Spongebob. And it was good. So good, in fact, that I started to sing with him. It put a much-needed rhythm to our work.
Twenty more minutes. Our hole had matured to the point where he could stand in it nearly up to his waist. I offered that if we didn’t find any treasure, we could at least bury him up to his neck. That would be fun, I said.
No. “There’s treasure here, Daddy. You just have to believe.”
I didn’t. But I dug anyway.
I watched out of sheer exhaustion as he put a scoop of sand into the strainer and shook it. A tiny storm of worn rocks and shells fell onto the pile beside us. And then there was a clink. Something had stuck, too big to tumble through the holes.
It was a tiny but perfectly intact clam shell.
He held it up, eyes bulging with wonder.
“Treasure,” he whispered. He held the shell out to me. “I want you to have this, Daddy.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
That shell is sitting here on my desk as I write this. A memento from a moment in time, yes, but also something much more. We all look for treasure, whether it be love or dreams or a better life. We dig and sift and search, and it’s easy to go about it the wrong way.
But just to keep you on task, I offer you this bit of how-to from my son, an expert treasure hunter.
Work first, play later.
Keep looking.
Sing.
Believe.
And always share what you find.
***
My friend katdish wrote a guest post for Author Culture today. If you’re a writer looking for some tips on how to market yourself online, it might be worth a read. Tell her I sent you. And then tell her I said to get back to work.
The People Next Door
June 21, 2010 by Billy Coffey · 8 Comments
image courtesy of photobucket.com
Vacation comes once a year for me, and so it’s a pretty big deal. By that time, I’ve usually managed to collect enough stress and sleeplessness to very nearly go insane.
The beach tends to cure both of those things for me. Well, the stress anyway. The ironic fact is that I usually tend to get less sleep at the ocean than at home. I don’t fault the cramped quarters or the noise for that. I blame the ocean. I can never stop looking at it.
Which makes the hotel balcony my very favorite part of vacation. I’m there almost as much as I’m on the beach, staring out at the people and the ships and the Navy jets and the water. Especially the water. Sometimes I’ll sit there until sunrise. Just watching.
I wasn’t alone in my sitting and staring this year. The couple next door made their nightly trips to their balcony, too. But as it turned out, their reasons for doing so were a little different than mine.
To hear their story, please stop by katdish’s site. The beach was nice. But I’m sure they would agree when I say some things mean more.
Stronger than Chocolate
June 18, 2010 by Billy Coffey · 36 Comments
image courtesy of photobucket.com
The two Lindt chocolate bars have been sitting on the kitchen counter for a week. By my count, they’ve each been sniffed, held, gazed at, and slobbered over by my children at least six thousand times. It was a long wait, but that wait is over.
The chocolate gene had been passed to them by me and then multiplied tenfold. My kids love chocolate. And they adore Lindt chocolate. Which makes it the perfect reward for a job well done, whether it be a good report card or the completion of a few extra chores.
Or in this case, the end of a school year.
So when they pretty-pleased me at the store a while back, I said sure. On one condition—they had to wait until the last day of school to eat them.
The motion was carried and passed with the stipulation that the candy bars not sit in the cabinet until that time. The kids wanted them out in the open. Eating them was one thing, they said. Savoring them would be better. That way, it would almost be like they could eat them twice, once with their eyes and once with their mouths.
So. Fine.
Today is the magical day. Last day of school, first chance to eat the chocolate. My son tried to convince me that morning that a candy bar would make a fantastic breakfast. My daughter agreed, using the good-not-great argument that chocolate is technically part of the dairy group. No dice. Wait until the afternoon, I said. At snack time. It’ll be perfect.
My son may have been the only child in history to start the last day of school crying. Not because it was the last day of school, but because he couldn’t start it with a candy bar in his stomach.
But he muddled through, of course. My daughter, too. And when they arrived home happy to begin two months of homework-free life, they were even more happy to know they could kick it off in style—on the front porch with sugar.
Which was when the trouble began.
Snacks are an important part of my daughter’s daily life. As a diabetic, she needs small meals between bigger ones to keep her insulin where it needs to be. A little chocolate in the afternoon does just fine. Assuming her sugar isn’t high.
And on that last day of school, it was high. Very. With all the emotion involved in saying a temporary goodbye to friends and teachers, her body was thrown out of whack.
The good news was that she was home and thus better able to cope. The bad news was she couldn’t eat her candy bar.
My son, however, was in the clear. He could eat all he wanted. And after spending a week sniffing and slobbering over the chocolate bar on the kitchen counter and being denied it by his mean father that morning, he was hungry for it. He deserved it. And he was free to eat it. He had the right.
He snatched the candy bar and headed toward the porch, hands raised in victory. But his one-person parade route took him past his sister, who sat on the sofa teary-eyed.
The two locked eyes for a long and moment. Nothing was said between them. Plenty was thought.
My daughter was thinking about how wrong it was that she had to suffer through such little moments of big unfairness. After all, she’d waited just as long for her candy bar. It wasn’t her fault that she was sick, that her pancreas didn’t work right and so she was doomed to forever be a slave to her body.
And my son was thinking of that unfairness, too. That just as she was powerless sometimes, he was powerless to help her. But just because he couldn’t fix things forever didn’t mean he couldn’t fix them for a little while. Pain is more easily borne when it’s divided in two.
“I don’t want this now,” he said. “I’m gonna wait until later when we can eat them together.”
All that happened a few hours ago. Things are better now. Both of them are in the rocking chairs on the front porch. Their dinner was good. Their dessert is better—chocolate bars. I can hear them talking and laughing, and it makes me nod and smile.
I have good kids.
Strong kids.
One is strong enough to endure what she cannot understand, to take her lumps as they’re given and then get up and play and laugh and dream afterward.
The other is strong enough to know that sometimes having the right and the freedom to do something doesn’t mean you should.
Growing Wide
June 16, 2010 by Billy Coffey · 22 Comments
photo courtesy of Jordon Murphy
So said a former college student who is now a full-fledged member of adult society, who stopped by a few hours ago to visit and say both hello and goodbye. The job she wanted in Washington is now hers. Life awaits. She’s not going to sit around and let it find her, she’s going after it.
She’s never been one to dip her toe into anything, either. No. She’s much more of a jumper. Often headfirst.
Her eagerness did me some good. Angst and pessimism seem to be the norms nowadays. It was nice to see someone actually excited about life. Most of us are “What’s next?” She’s “What’s next!”
She also has a penchant for pithy one-liners like I want to grow wide.
“You mean up, right?” I asked her. “You want to grow up.”
“No. Wide.”
I lifted the baseball cap off my head, readjusted it, and put it back on. The universal male sign for I Don’t Understand What You’re Saying, So Give Me A Minute.
“You want to get…fat?”
She snorted into her hand. “No,” she said. “That’s not what I mean.”
“Then what do you mean?”
She took a seat beside me at the table and then lean forward, thinking.
“Everyone is telling me that it’s time to grow up,” she said. “And they’re right, it is. I mean let’s face it, I studied hard through college and all, but I also had my fun. I was a kid. But I’m not a kid anymore. Follow me?”
“Yes.”
“And I’ll accept the fact that I’m not a kid anymore. I’m good with that. I think it’s time I had some responsibility. I’m looking forward to it. I think a lot of people shun that nowadays. It’s like everything is anyone’s fault but your own.”
“But that’s growing up,” I said again.
She waved me off. “I guess. But that’s not such a big deal, really. Everyone knows you have to grow up sooner or later. I just want…more.”
She looked at me and saw the confusion on my face. Or the smudge of grease on my cheek. It had been a long day.
“What do you want out of life?” she asked me.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “What most people want, I suppose—some quiet, some success, and some happiness.”
“Me, too. But you know what? I think the noise and the failure and the sadness has to come before the quiet and the success and the happiness. You can’t have one without the other. I might not know everything, but I know that. And I know that sometimes all the bad stuff mixes in with the good stuff, too. It’s not like you have all of one and none of the other. You can be happy, but you can have a little sadness in you at the same time. Get me?”
“I think so.”
“Most people, they stay as far away from the bad stuff as they can get. I guess you can’t blame them. My father? He was sad too much and didn’t have a lot of happy. Unless he was drinking, anyway. Which is why he kept drinking more and more, thinking it would make him happier and happier. Know what it got him?”
I did. I remembered the semester she had to take off during her junior year when he drank himself to death.
“You could say he grew up, you know,” she told me. “He had a good job, paid the bills, never got into trouble, all that. Aside from the drinking, he was responsible. Maybe even in spite of the drinking. Just because you grow up doesn’t mean you become a better person.”
“So you don’t want to grow up after all?”
“No,” she said, “I do. And I will. But I want to grow wide, too. I want to know that I won’t run from the bad things in life. That there’s just as much beauty in sadness and noise as there is in happiness and peace. There is, right?”
“From my experience?” I asked. “Yes. Absolutely.”
“So I’m gonna grow wide. I’m not going to diet on just the good stuff. I think life should be a feast, so you might as well not be afraid to taste it all.”
She left soon after that with a promise to keep in touch. I think she will. To be honest, I worry about a lot of these students when they leave. Most of them have no idea what’s waiting for them out there in that big world.
But not her. I think she’ll be just fine. And wide, too.
Compassion in the Cold
June 14, 2010 by Billy Coffey · 34 Comments
image courtesy of photobucket.com
I remember standing at an overlook in the mountains on a December night in 2006. I remember it was cold. Very cold. And though it made sense for me just to get back into the truck and turn the heat on, I couldn’t. I had to be outside with the stars and the wind. What I had to do couldn’t be done from inside the truck.
So I went ahead and built the fire. Walked down into the woods, found some rocks, dug a fire pit, and gathered kindling. I got the fire going despite the wind and tossed a few bigger sticks onto the pile. Cedar, I remember. I always liked the smell of burning cedar. And then I leaned back and half smiled and half didn’t, because it was all ready whether I wanted it to be or not.
I reached into my bag and pulled out a thick wad of paper bound by two rubber bands. I turned it over in my hands, watching the firelight dance against it.
Now, I thought…now.
But nothing happened. Whether it was the cold or God or the fabled spirits of the mountain, something had severed the connection between my head and my hands.
Failure seemed too bitter a word, so I decided it was all about letting go. About knowing how to as much as when to. The how was easy. I would burn it. That was the first thought that came to mind a few days before when I got the latest reply. The when, though? Not so easy. I thought for sure it would be that night, but I was having my doubts.
When you spend ten years of your life hanging onto a dream, it takes a lot out of you. You learn to get by on things like faith and hope and tenacity. You try to accustom yourself to blocking out the army of voices both within and without that scream you have no idea what you’re doing and therefore you shouldn’t even bother pretending anymore. It takes strength to endure more than it does talent.
I had the strength. The faith, too. Even had the hope and the tenacity. But something was still missing, and it was a big something. Something that seemed important enough that missing it brought me there in the mountains sitting in front of a fire, ready to incinerate five years of my life.
I was going to burn my manuscript. Release it into the ether once and more all and let its memory float away. I wanted to be done with my dream. I wanted to let go of it so it would let go of me.
I tried once more—
…now—
but I couldn’t, so I simply sat there in the cold and watched the flames dance.
This was not about letting go after all, I decided. No, it really was about failure.
I had pushed myself. Worked and tried and refused to give up, and still after all of that I had nothing to show for my life. It wasn’t that I was too weak to hang on or even too strong to let go. It was that I was stuck in the middle, wavering. A tough place to be. Maybe the toughest. But looking back I think that’s a place we all need to find ourselves at some point, if only so we can find out if our dreams are worthy of the people God calls us to be.
I was thinking about that night one day last week while I was looking over the Fall 2010-Winter 2011 catalog for my publisher, FaithWords. Not only was it pretty darn exciting to see my book on page nine, it was even more so to see they’ve used the cover art for Snow Day as the cover for the catalog. If you’d like, you can see it here.
My point?
My point is that in the end, your dreams are all on you. That means having the faith to see them through.
Having the hope to keep believing.
And it means forgiving yourself when you fail.
The compassion we’re called to show others is the very compassion we’re called to show ourselves. That alone is a source of divine strength.
That alone can move mountains.
I’m proof of that.
This post is part of the blog carnival on Compassion, hosted by Bridget Chumbley. To read more, please visit her site.
Letting Myself Go
June 14, 2010 by Billy Coffey · 10 Comments
I’ll be getting up as usual today, and that means just ahead of the sun. The only difference is that this time I won’t be doing so to go to work, I’ll be doing so to run away.
That’s what I tend to call my vacations. Running away. I refer to them as such not in any sort of mean-spirited way. As stressful and tiresome as my life can get at times, it is nonetheless a good life. I really don’t have much to run away from.
It is nice, however, to know that if I ever do have much to run away from, I have somewhere to go. To the ocean. The great thing about living in Virginia is that everything is spread out and close. In the matter of a few hours, I can trade mountains for sea. Not a bad deal at all.
Going to the beach always seems to put me in a reflective mood, and this year is no different. If I bother to pay attention to both family legend and historical fact (and I do), you could say seawater runs in my veins. Personally, I think that’s pretty cool.
So to hear about what the ocean does to me, follow me over to katdish’s website. And I promise that tonight as I’m sitting on a balcony overlooking the Atlantic, I’ll pause to raise a glass to you. No, really.
Your story
June 11, 2010 by Billy Coffey · 26 Comments
A local high school teacher contacted me recently asking for help with a group of her English students. They had a problem, she said. Could I help? Since she happened to be a longtime friend and I didn’t have much else to do, I said yes. Absolutely.
But it turned out to be more than simply helping out a friend or filling in a lazy summer afternoon. Much more. Because the problem was basic. Simple yet foundational.
They had nothing to write about.
They were your stereotypical teenagers—clumsy and loud, with a strange combination of fear and arrogance. They one thing that set them apart from their peers was a love for writing, whether that love was expressed or bubbling just beneath the surface.
But of course a love for writing isn’t enough, is it? You have to do something with that love. You need material. And they had none. Zero. Nada.
Or so they thought.
I can’t say I managed to convince all of them otherwise in the three or so hours I was there. But I think I convinced some. And I most assuredly convinced a few. Considering the fact it’s darn near impossible to get a teenager to change his or her mind about anything, I’d call that a victory.
But then I started considering the fact that thinking there isn’t anything interesting about one’s life isn’t just for teenagers. Not just for writers, either. We all fool ourselves into thinking there isn’t anything that separates us from everyone else. So I thought I’d give the same little pep talk to you today that I gave those students a couple weeks ago. Just in case.
It’s amazing how the rules to good writing are also the rules to good living. The two go hand in hand, I think. Good writing means cutting out all the excess, whittling down what you want to say until all that’s left is what you need to say. Same with living. Whittle it down. Find the basics. Keep it simple. Makes for not just a better story, but a better life, too.
I wasn’t visiting that class to talk about the basics of a good story, though. I was there to talk about the basics of getting ideas. Not surprisingly, that just so happened to be my own Rule Number One to good writing. And good living.
Rule Number One:
You are extraordinary.
Don’t let anyone fool you by saying otherwise. Some will try, of course. Some will try very hard. They’ll say you’re good or nice or polite or even special, but not extraordinary. And maybe you’ll even tell yourself that. Don’t. That’s a lie, and maybe the biggest lie of all. Fall for it, and nothing will really happen. Don’t fall for it, and everything will.
It’s not just you that’s extraordinary, either. Your life is, too. What you’re feeling, what you’re doing, and what you’re thinking. Your dreams and your fears, your hopes and worries. Extraordinary, and in a very special way. On the one hand, those things are unique to you, and how you approach each of them is determined by everything from you DNA to your experiences and beliefs.
But on the other hand, those dreams and fears and hopes and worries are for the most part shared by every other person who’s ever walked in this world. There is an invisible line that runs through the heart of every person, connecting you not only to your family and friends, but to your neighbor down the road and strangers you’ll never meet. As different as we may seem to be on the outside, we’re all the same on the inside.
You are common in that sense, yes. But only in the way Da Vinci and Einstein and Twain were common. They were extraordinary in what they did with their commonness. You can be the same.
Think of this world as a house with many rooms. Some are big and wide and hold many people. Others are small and cramped and hold just a few. But all of those rooms are dark inside.
When you’re born, God gives you a light and places you in one of those rooms. It might be a big one with many people. Maybe it’s just a smaller one with a few.
But my point is this—it doesn’t matter what kind of room you’re in. Doesn’t matter who’s there and who isn’t.
All that matters is that you do what you’re meant to do.
All that matters is that you shine your light.
Author of Snow Day and Paper Angels (November 2011), both by FaithWords. But don't let that fool you. I'm just as confused as anyone.
And that is fine with me, because the great thing about wandering around in the fog is that you never know what you might run into.
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