God is good
April 27, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 23 Comments
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So evidently the valve that sends water from my pipes to my refrigerator has been leaking for about a year and a half. Not gushing, mind you. I would notice gushing. Dripping instead, and one drop every six seconds to be exact (I’ve counted). You can’t hear dripping like that, not amongst the noises of a stovetop, a dishwasher, and the normal chatter of a normal household. That’s what I tell myself. And though I also tell myself I should have known something was wrong—very, very wrong—I counter by asking who in the world makes it a habit to look behind their refrigerator?
Ten drops of water per minute for 547 days.
Know how many drops that is all together? Almost eight million.
Know what eight million drops of water can do to those parts of your home you can’t see? Grow the sort of mold that resembles something out of the X-Files. Scary mold that kills people.
And apparently, it’s now everywhere in my home.
I called The Guys (there are always Guys, those who make their living solving most every problem one can have, even X-Files mold). They came over the other evening to check things out in the deep recesses of Casa de Coffey. They were polite, almost sorry they had to be there. I was sorrier. They spoke in soft tones and carried Buck knives on their belts. Almost every Guy I’ve ever known has carried a Buck knife on his belt.
They took air samples and pictures, showed me what was happening. Asked if we’d had any recent health issues. They brought in an air scrubber that hums with all the stealth of a jet liner and said to keep it running every day all day.
Guy 1 and Guy 2 took turns relaying the bad news. Two walls would have to come down. Cabinets and floors would have to be replaced. A quarantine zone would have to be put up, which meant we’d have to go elsewhere to live.
“As far as cost goes…” Guy 1 looked at his boots. I looked at Guy 2, who had suddenly taken a great interest in the painting on the wall beside him. I’ll admit that was the moment my palms began to sweat. “…well, it won’t be inexpensive. I can’t give you a number until we get the air samples back. But it’ll be okay. We do this all the time.”
It’ll be okay.
We do this all the time.
The Guys left with the promise they’d get in touch once the lab finds out exactly what sort of poison we’re all inhaling. A nice thought, that.
Normally in such circumstances—as if such circumstances could ever be thought of as normal—I would be freaking out. Big time. But I’m not, at least not yet. Mostly because of what else happened around here the day we found our creeping mold.
Stand on our back deck and turn your head to the left and you’ll see some woods, beyond which lie the western half of town. That’s where the tornado hit. Hurling and destroying and whipping and gnashing through neighborhoods and farms and leaving behind a scene that one would literally take your breath away.
Just on the other side of the railroad tracks live one Amish family in particular. Their house burned the day after Christmas. No injuries, but most everything else was lost. True to the Amish way, relatives and strangers from as close as next door and as far away as Ohio showed up to rebuild everything. It was quite a scene, one that made the front page of the paper. The sort of story that made you feel good inside.
Now, just a few months later, their farm gets hit by a tornado. The new house is damaged, but not nearly as badly as the grove of oaks that ring it.
The mother and father were on the news tonight. Standing on their front porch, he with his long beard and she in her homemade dress. Smiling as they answered questions that bothered us all.
The mother answered for them both when she said, “God is good.”
Yes, that’s what she said. God is good, despite it all.
My family and I are making plans to find a place to stay for a while. Insurance won’t cover the cost (seepage, they said, which seems to be a fancy word for You’re On Your Own). We’ll have to take a loan out for the repairs.
It’ll be okay. That’s what The Guys said. I believe that. Trouble comes to everyone uninvited. It barges in and kicks up its feet and announces that it’s going to stay awhile. It says, “What do you think now?”
When it does, I’ll give the Amish mother’s answer.
“God is good.”
A question of prayer
April 25, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 20 Comments
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I would call none of our conversations a sharing of ideas. Their words and the diplomas that hang on their office walls are proof enough they are much more intelligent than little ol’ me. I’m good with that. There are advantages to being the dumb person in the room.
So the other day when my mind asked a question my heart had trouble answering, I went knocking on some office doors.
The first chair I sat in was in front of four bookcases that stretched floor to ceiling and were stuffed with titles I could barely pronounce. The professor—smart fella, with a Ph.D. in philosophy courtesy of an Ivy League school—looked at me with kind eyes and asked what was on my mind.
“What’s the point of praying for anything?” I asked him. “I mean, if God knows everything and has a perfect plan, then won’t His plan work out regardless of what I tell Him?”
The professor took off his glasses, rubbed the lenses with a handkerchief. Then he put the glasses back on and looked at the bookshelves behind me, looking for an answer.
“Let’s see,” he told me. He rose from the chair by the desk and brought down one book—this one old, with a worn leather cover and yellowed pages—and then another, this one so new the spine cracked as he opened it.
He talked for ten minutes about free will and time being an unfinished sentence. Or something. My nods at first were of the understanding kind. The ones toward the end were because I was fighting sleep.
I still don’t know what he said.
The door down the hall belonged to a religion professor (Ph.D. again, Ivy League again). I sat in a different chair in front of different books and asked the same question with the same results. More free will, plus something about alternate histories and God “delighting in Himself.”
It wasn’t the first time I’d walked into a professor’s office with one question and walked out with a dozen.
To make matters worse, my mind was still asking that question and my heart was still having trouble answering it.
What’s the point of praying for anything? Because it seems a little presumptuous to ask for anything from a God who already knows what I need (and what I don’t).
I was at a standstill over all of this until I talked to Ralph at the Dairy Queen last night. Ralph doesn’t have a Ph.D., and the only Ivy he knows is the kind that grows on the side of his house. And though far from an expert on matters of the spirit, he does preach part-time at one of the local churches when the regular preacher is sick or on vacation. And since he waved at me and was eating his cheeseburger all alone, I figured what the heck. I’d ask him:
“What’s the point of praying for anything?”
Ralph paused mid-chew. Cocked his head a little to the side. Said, “What kinda stupid question is that?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Just popped into my head the other day. But seriously, why ask Him for anything. And really, why pray at all? If God already knows what’s in my heart, why do I have to speak it?”
Ralph finished his bite, swallowed, then said, “B’cause it ain’t about you, son.”
“It’s not?”
He drawled out a slow “No” that sounded more like Nooo. “Boy, prayin’ ain’t about askin’. Ain’t even about praisin’, really. Nope, prayin’s about you gettin’ in line with God. It’s not about Him gettin’ in your head and heart, it’s about you gettin’ in His.”
Ah.
I left Ralph to his cheeseburger, answers in hand. And honestly, that answer made sense. Because life—better life, anyway—is always about Him more than about us.
And I left with other wisdom, too. The next time I have a question, I think I’ll spend less time in a professor’s office and more time down at the Dairy Queen.
The Kissing Tree
April 20, 2011 by Katdish · 15 Comments
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The tree stood like a king in the middle of the field, gazing over its sovereignty. It was tall, taller than any building in town. And old, as evidenced by a trunk so thick that it split partway up so as to give the appearance it was two and not one. Its canopy stretched out and then down, as if gathering up those who pause beneath it.
To see it was to recall the Ents of Tolkien’s Middle-earth. The tree was that magical. Put your ear to its wood and you could swear you sensed a beating heart and coursing blood just beneath the bark. Listen, and beneath the chirps of the robins and mockingbirds and the squirrels snacking on nuts you could almost hear the stories it had to tell, old stories of long-ago times and long-ago people, back when times were simpler and a man named Wenger owned the field.
The oak was known by many names, but mostly it was The Kissing Tree. There was evidence of that if you look closely enough, names and initials scrawled into the wood but even then mostly absorbed, adding to the stories the tree could tell. Some said the tree had grown to such magnificence because it had been watered with love as well as rain. But I knew better, even then. No doubt there had been much love kindled beneath that gathering canopy (and no doubt many children), but there had also been much love that was kindled only to be extinguished by fickle hearts and dashed dreams.
Such was my experience there on that day.
Her name was Sara, a neighborhood girl who lived down the road in a house that defied any description beyond a simple Fancy. She was smart and achingly pretty and knew how to climb trees. Once on a dare, she leaped into the murky, snake-infested river down by the place where Murphy Johnson swore he saw a ghost. She swam to the other shore and back again and said it was no sweat.
I knew then I was in love with her. She was perfect. And best of all, she wanted to kiss me.
I was eleven that summer and had never kissed a girl, didn’t know how or how long a person should do it and what I should do afterward. But I at least knew where to take her for that kiss.
We met at The Kissing Tree on a hot afternoon in July. That’s when I saw the tree as king of the Ents and felt it’s beating heart. Sara was already there, dressed in a pair of denim shorts and a white T shirt that showed the bumps on her chest. Seeing them and her and knowing we were alone under The Kissing Tree was enough to make me turn tail and run away, but I didn’t. I was too scared to move.
We talked for a bit, me about baseball and going to the beach the next week and Sara about how her mom and dad always fought and she wished she could run away. I think in that moment I saw her for the first time, not the tough little girl who swam across the river to where Murphy saw that ghost, but the fragile little girl who wanted nothing more than to be loved. As scared as I was, I wanted to kiss her even more then, just so she could hold that happiness tight, if only for a moment.
We closed our eyes and kissed beneath that great oak, adding our names to the stories it could tell.
Things between us didn’t work out. They seldom do when you’re eleven. But I ran into Sara the other day, and our talk wound itself back to that day beneath The Kissing Tree. It was strange that our versions were similar but not exact. She could not remember telling me of her parents. I did not recall us bumping heads before we met lips. And while I swore we kissed beneath the tree, she promised it was away beyond its shadow instead.
It was strange knowing one of the moments I thought had defined me was a fuzzy one. Not as sharp, as exact, as I thought. Now I wonder of all of my reminiscences are such, if my memory has glossed over them and rounded their sharp edges. I wonder if memory is simply an incomplete experience.
And I wonder if that is our blessing or our curse.
Adventures in junk mail and maturity
April 18, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 27 Comments
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My mailman—mail lady, actually—says that approximately four out of every seven pieces of mail she delivers to my neighborhood could be classified as junk. She shakes her head at the fact that most of her work goes straight from the mailbox to the garbage can.
I thought about that yesterday while walking to the porch from the mailbox, a handful of letters in my grasp. Most were destined for recycling (I thought the mail lady would somehow feel better knowing that, and I promised myself I’d tell her next time she came around). But even that didn’t seem to do all her hard work justice. So I made it a point to sit and open each and every letter. Read them, even. Then I could toss them away without feeling so guilty.
There was the usual fare—satellite television offers, a flyer from the local furniture store, a newsletter from a church my family visited five years ago.
But it was the last letter that caught my attention. A thick, linen envelope, my name embossed with gold letters on the front. Fancy for junk mail.
The return address was just that—an address. I tore it open and read:
“Dear Friend.”
Not exactly personable. Then again, junk mail never is. But then:
“Whether you realize it or not, you’re a person of influence.”
Well now, that’s more like it.
“You live with passion and purpose”—
I do!
—“encouraging and helping others”—
Yes!
—“and building a legacy for your family and future generations—”
Okay, I’ll buy that.
Way down in the fourth paragraph, I finally realized what they were getting at. It was a magazine advertisement, one “for people just like you” that offered a monthly assortment of “inspiring stories from others like you who deserve to live a hopeful, vibrant life.”
I’ll admit, it sounded interesting. Which is why I actually finished the letter. Then I turned to the inserts (full color, mind you) of sample articles, which to my surprise seemed overly populated by elderly people.
That’s when I discovered the publication’s name.
Mature Living.
And that’s when I discovered exactly what had happened.
I’d just been solicited for an old folks magazine.
I stood there in the middle of my living room, flabbergasted. Surely this was some mistake. Me? No. Surely not. I’m not old. Sure, in the minds of some I could be consider older. But not old. And yeah, I’m a little thin on top, but a lot of guys are, guys younger than me, and besides I have a tattoo and shop at Abercombie & Fitch. Old people don’t do that.
But it still bugged me. My wife said I wasn’t old, though I thought that was likely because she’s older than I am and telling me I was would make her old by proxy. My kids said I was old—“Ancient,” said my daughter—but to them, anyone over twenty is old.
I was at a loss. Why were the people at Mature Living picking on me? My family said to let it go—“Bein’ mad’s not good for your heart, Daddy,” said my daughter—but I couldn’t. So I did what any sane person would do. I called the number at the end of the letter and asked them how they got my name.
It was a lady’s voice on the other end of the line—a young voice, though I suddenly realized that young to me was twenty-five. Megan, she said. Can I help you?
“Yes.” I cleared my throat, suddenly wondering what in the world I was doing. “Megan. Hi. My name is Billy.” (Billy being a very youngish name.) “I just received one of your advertisements in the mail.”
“Wonderful!” said Megan. “Would you like to begin a subscription.”
“No. No Megan, I would not. I just need to know how you got my name. Is there some old people’s database? Do you buy your names from pharmacies or something? Because I picked up a prescription for my dad the other day, and that wasn’t for me.”
Megan didn’t know what to say to that. Didn’t know where the names came from, either.
“Are you sure you don’t want to begin a subscription?” she asked.
“No. I mean yes. Yes, Megan, I am sure. I am not mature. Do you hear me?”
And then I hung up.
I’m not sure what Megan thought of that, but she likely had quite a story to tell during her break.
It’s funny how we think we’re comfortable with who and where we are in this life, and how quickly we are faced with the truth.
I won’t make that mistake again. Next time, all the junk mail’s going straight to the trash.
This post is part of the One Word at a Time Blog Carnival: Adventure. To read more adventurous posts, visit my friend Peter Pollock at PeterPollock.com
Over the rainbow
April 13, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 19 Comments
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“It’s over there,” he tells me, and then points a bony hand to the left side of the windshield.
“Don’t think we can get there from here,” I say.
My son wrinkles his brow. He knows I’m right; we’ve been on this road before. Many times.
“Can we park and walk?” he asks. “It’s not far, and Mr. Coyner won’t mind if we walk through his field.” He pauses and then adds, “Guess that means we’ll have to share with him, though.”
I nod and say “Guess so,” not surprised by his sense of fairness but still happy to see it in full display. There aren’t a lot of kids in this world who are okay with sharing. Especially when what they’re sharing could be millions of dollars.
The sun is out now, the air sticky and warm, a sharp contrast to what the weather was just a short time ago. The storm was a mean one, the sort of tempest that Virginia is known to have in springtime. Wind and water and thunder. It passed us over and rumbled away, leaving behind an eerie calm and a giant rainbow outside the kitchen window. I called the kids to have a look, more interested in their reactions than the rainbow itself.
My daughter ooh’d and ahh’d as she is wont to do. True to her artsy-fartsy personality, the immediately grabbed a notebook and began drawing one of her own.
My son? Not artsy-fartsy. He’s much more pragmatic regarding such things. I wasn’t surprised when he said, “I know where that ends.” He looked at me, smiling. “It ends right in Mr. Coyner’s field, doesn’t it?”
I looked. Sure enough, it did appear to end smack in the middle of Mr. Coyner’s field.
“Daddy?” he asked. I knew what was coming—“Wanna, you know, take a drive out there?”
To be honest, I didn’t. I had a lot to do. But then I realized that it had been a good long while since I’d gone looking for the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. And besides, Mr. Coyner’s field was right down the road.
Why not?
“Let’s go,” I told him.
Ten minutes later, we’re on a dirt road that is alive with birdsong. The field is just ahead. My son is telling me what he’s going to do with the money he finds. He’ll split some with Mr. Coyner, he tells me again. And of course there’s what’s due to God (“He made the rainbow, after all, so I reckon I’ll just give it to the church.”) And he was going to let me quit my job and just write books that everyone would read and let his mother quit teaching and we could all move to an island in the ocean and swim with dolphins.
I had to admit, it sounded pretty good.
Up ahead, the field.
He cranes his neck. Says, “Do you still see it, Daddy?”
“Nope,” I tell him. He sighs. “But maybe a rainbow is one of those things you can’t see if you’re right up on it.”
He nods, says I’m right, and I start to feel a little sorry for him.
I think about the homework assignment he did the other night. The lesson was about needs and wants, and he had to draw a picture of each. Under the Wants section, my son drew a cheeseburger. Under the Needs, a hundred dollar bill. That’s my son, the budding capitalist. His dream is to be rich.
The field now. No matter how philosophical I can be, no matter how much I lie this time, nothing I can say will convince him of anything other than the truth.
There is no rainbow.
And because there is no rainbow, there is no gold.
And because there is no gold, there will be no needs met for my son today.
“Well,” I tell him, “at least we had a good walk.”
My son shrugs. His bottom lip is stuck outward. It’s his usual pouting posture.
I take his hand and say, “Come on, let’s go back home. Maybe we can have a little ice cream on the porch.”
He walks beside me, looking back over his shoulder every few steps. Just to make sure, he says.
Call it the first stage of an important lesson. Life is all about wants and needs and being able to tell the difference between the two. He has those a little mixed up at the moment, but he won’t for long.
He’ll learn as I’ve learned—that the dream isn’t something we need as much as something we want.
What we need is the journey to it.
Gums
April 11, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 19 Comments
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Took a day off from work a while back to do something I haven’t done in about twenty years—go on a field trip. My daughter’s class was to spend the day at a local university, and she was psyched for some Daddy Time. I was pretty psyched my own self. That goes to show you how long it’s been since I’ve been around about sixty third-graders.
Any thought that our time together would be both quiet and alone was quickly put to rest with the appearance of one of my daughter’s friends, who sat with us on the bus. The little girl’s name still escapes me, though I’m sure she mentioned it. Many, many times. Mentioned quite a few other things as well. Many, many times.
Country folk like me (the men in particular) tend to shy away from calling people by their given names, opting instead for nicknames of their own creation. There is an art to this. A good nickname is comical but not mean, and usually connotes a certain physical attribute or facet of personality. I tell you that so I can tell you the nickname I’d given my daughter’s friend by the time we hit the interstate.
Gums.
Because she never shut up.
Never, ever.
The trip began with me in the middle of a bus seat designed for two small children at the most. Ours contained two small children and one big redneck. Gums began her questions early and often:
“Are you the writer?”
“You don’t look like a writer.”
“Why do your jeans have holes in them?”
“Why don’t you have any hair?”
“Can I have a copy of your book?”
“Why don’t you shave?”
“Is that your notebook?”
“Can I see?”
That was the moment I paused and asked my daughter if she would mind switching seats. There would be more room for us if I was at the window, I told her. It was a lie, of course. But the truth was that I wanted to use her as a sort of human shield, and I couldn’t tell her that.
For her part, Gums didn’t mind. She could talk across my daughter to me just as easily. I had a headache the size of Texas by the time we got off the bus.
We made our way into a ballroom, the setting for most of the day’s activities. Seven people to a table. My daughter sidled up to me in her chair. So did Gums.
Third grade fieldtrips seem to revolve around crafts. I’m not a craft sort of guy. My little girl is (thankfully), though I still had to pitch in with the glue, the tape, and the stapler. Likewise Gums, who managed to staple both herself and me to the mask she was making before we finally got everything straightened out.
That’s how most of the day went, my arms tired from my daughter clinging to them and my ears tired from the chorus of “Daddy, look!” and “Hey Mr. Coffey, c’mere!” It didn’t take me long to realize I’d never make it as a teacher.
The ride home was interesting. Me mashed against the window, my lap filled with a ceremonial mask made out of construction paper and fake feathers and a drum make out of two popcorn containers. Mass hysteria from the seats behind me, teachers fighting the good fight to keep everything calm.
My daughter laid her head on my shoulder. I saw her smile, and I knew the day had been worth it. A smile from her is always worth it.
Gums peeked at me and made a come-here motion with her finger. I leaned in close, ready for whatever questions she had this time. She had none. Instead, she leaned her mouth toward my ear and whispered, “I wish I had a daddy like you.”
Oh my.
I didn’t mind Gums talking the rest of the ride home. And to be honest, I kind of felt bad for nicknaming her Gums (though she seemed to enjoy it quite a bit).
But I learned a lot on that field trip. Not just how to make ceremonial masks and drums, either. I learned a little something about kids, too.
About how they need something else besides food, water, shelter, and love.
They need attention, too. They need adults looking at them in the eyes and listening to the things they say. And say, and say…
Planning for reality
April 6, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 12 Comments
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Despite the fact it snowed last weekend, I’m still told spring is on the way. There is enough evidence of that to give me hope. The robins have returned, for one. Baseball season is officially underway. And I am getting ready for a vacation.
Looks like the family will be heading to Emerald Isle, North Carolina sometime this summer. Never been, and I’m looking forward to it. It’s a ways, of course—seven hours or so on the road. Which means there’s a lot to plan.
Temporarily moving both myself and my family seven hours to the south and east is quite the undertaking. There are reservations to make and deposits to send. Routes to map out. Prescriptions to have in hand. Lists to make. Eventualities for which to prepare. The logistics can be overwhelming. It’s almost as if the Coffeys are preparing to land at Normandy. I’ve even resorted to buying a notebook so I can keep track of things.
I’m sure your household isn’t much different. There’s a lot involved in planning for a vacation. And though all that planning isn’t what I’d call fun, it isn’t work, either. Sorting out where we’ll go and what we’ll do makes me think of hot sand and warm water, and that’s a comfort in the midst of this cold Virginia March.
Lately I’ve been wondering about all this planning, though. Not the necessity of it, but why I don’t do more of it elsewhere. I can tell you with exact precision where I’ll be on a North Carolina beach in a few months, but not where I’ll be tomorrow. I can tell you what I’ll do then, but not what I’m going to do now. And I can describe my vacation goals (they’re on page 3 of my notebook), but I’d be hard pressed to tell you what my goals are for this afternoon.
See what I mean? I have discovered the great shame of my life, and it is this—I plan my vacations better than I plan my life.
The opposite should be true, right? But it isn’t. I justify everything I’m doing now by telling myself that vacation comes only once a year for me, and for only a week. Better make it count, then. Better make it as wonderful as I can, because for the next 358 days after, the memory of it is going to have to hold me over.
And while that makes a certain degree of sense, it’s the sort of reasoning that falls apart when you look at it hard enough. Isn’t it kind of ridiculous to spend so much of my time planning on one week out of the year when there are fifty-one other weeks that should demand just as much attention? How much better would my life be if I thought of every week as a vacation week, here once and then never here again?
It’s a question I’m sure to ponder for a long while, and one I think we all should. We let too many of our days pass us by with the false promise that tomorrow is sure to come. As much as I’m all for slowing down, I do think a healthy sense of urgency is required for any good life. It passes so fast. We assume time is on our side. It isn’t. Every tick of the clock, every beat of the heart, is one less moment we have.
I’ll have to keep that in mind, that and the knowing that it is much easier to plan an escape from reality than to plan for reality itself.
You only go around once
April 4, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 21 Comments
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A favorite saying of my mother: “You only go ’round this life once.”
Drilled into my head since I was a boy. It was a warning, though one I never truly heeded because it was only partially understood. “You only go ’round this life once” was sort of like my father’s “You can’t see the forest for the trees.” Catchy, but vague.
I’m going to be thirty-nine this summer, which is just close enough to forty to get me worrying. Not that I fret too much about the grinding of the wheels of time. Forty doesn’t mean as much as it used to. In fact, I’ve read that forty is the new thirty. That’s supposed to make me feel better, I suppose. And it does. But still…
It’s fair to say that forty can be considered a good halfway point in most people’s lives. That’s about the point where a lot of us look back over our shoulders and realize there’s a whole lot behind us, then look ahead and swear we can see a speck of something on the horizon. And though death’s great sting isn’t as great as I once thought it to be, I still feel like there’s a lot left for me to do.
And lately I’ve come to realize the gravity of the fact I only go ’round this life once. Time, now, is the issue. Much more now than it’s ever been.
But it’s not just the time I have left to do things I’ve always wanted to do, it’s the time I have left to fix the things I’ve broken. I’ve broken a lot of things in my life. Done things I shouldn’t, said things I shouldn’t. I look back on a lot of my past not in reverie, but in regret. So much so that I now find myself at this magical midpoint thinking a do-over of my first forty years would be nice.
I think about all the time I’ve wasted. Not just wasted by watching television or daydreaming on the front porch, but wasted by worry and fear. Often I realize I have lived vast parcels of my life in reverse and upside down—the things that really should have bothered me never did, and the things that really bothered me were things that didn’t shouldn’t have bothered me at all.
I still act like this. A lot.
But now I’m beginning to realize I shouldn’t, that life is too short and too precious to be mindful of tiny irritations and bothersome fears. The first half of one’s life is viewed through the lens of ourselves—our needs, our wants, our desires. The second half is viewed through the lens of eternity. That’s when we begin to see that as big as this world can seem, it’s really the smallest thing we will ever experience.
I wish I could have figured all of this out earlier. Time and experience have a way of teaching us what we’ve always ignored, though. I spend a lot of my day with people who say if there was a God, He would do something about all of the pain in the world. I tell them I stumble over that sometimes too, but that I also understand if it weren’t for the pains in my own life, I wouldn’t know anything.
That part, at least, I’ve gotten right.
But there is much I haven’t.
It seems a bit pessimistic to be looking ahead at my coming years with the express purpose not to screw them up as badly as I managed the previous ones. That’s what I’m going to do, though. And I’m going to try and love more and worry less. I’m going to try to have faith instead of fear. And I’m going to make the attempt to smile as much in the pain as in the happiness.
Because my mother was right, you only go ’round this life once.
But if you do it right, once is all you’ll need.
Life is a gift to be treasured.
***
This post is part of the One Word at a Time Blog Carnival: Treasure hosted by my friend Peter Pollock. For most posts about Treasure, please visit him at PeterPollock.com
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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