The cosmic dance
August 4, 2010 by Billy Coffey · 29 Comments
image courtesy of photobucket.com
My little town isn’t so little anymore. Its population has boomed in the last twenty years from about three thousand to right around ten thousand people. The old two-lane road is now four. The lone stoplight we used to have has somehow given birth to five more. And there seems to always be a new subdivision being built in an old cornfield.
Ask the business owners, and they’ll say all this growth is a good thing. Ask the old timers, and they’ll tell you that it isn’t so good. The town’s growing, they say, but the community is shrinking. There’s a difference, and it’s a big one. I used to have to drive down Main Street with my hand perpetually stuck in the wave position. Not so much anymore. There are a lot of people I don’t know. Which means you can be surrounded by people and still feel lonely sometimes.
Many have come from the south and west in search of work, but most have come from the north. That fact alone was cause for concern for a lot of people here, those old in both age and ways and who still smart from the last time the Yankees invaded. But those times are over. These new Yankees do not have violence on their minds, but retirement. They’re tired of the cities and the noise. They want the peace and quiet of the country.
So they come. They buy their houses and settle in with the expressed purpose to slow down and take things easier. To force their lives not to be so hectic. “We’re always moving,” one of them told me the other day. “It’s just this constant state of having to do something. We hated it. So we came here. We just wanted to slow down and stop.”
I tried not to smile, but I did anyway.
This once-sleepy town is no Nirvana. It offers much, but not stoppage. Because the fact of life is that it’s busy and we’re always moving.
It doesn’t seem fair, really. As children, all we want is to go. Doesn’t matter to where or for what or how long, just as long as it’s somewhere. But the years wear on us. There are responsibilities. There is work and family and goals and dreams and we’re in the middle of it all, running. Moving. We long to slow down and stop not because we’re lazy, but because we’re tired. And because at some point we begin wondering if this is really all life has to offer, just more moving and more doing and never any rest.
I’ve wondered that myself lately. And I think that maybe the answer to that is no. Maybe that’s all life is. Movement.
I read the other day that the Earth spins on its axis every twenty-four hours at a speed of 1,000 mph. Pretty fast, isn’t it? Not as fast as this planet’s speed around the Sun, though. That’s 66,000 mph. So technically speaking, that means even though you think you’re sitting still and reading this right on the other side of a computer screen, you’ve traveled six hundred miles since you began reading this paragraph.
No wonder we’re always so tired.
I suppose that from the universe’s standpoint, not only is there not much we can do about our constant moving, we should be thankful there isn’t. Moving means life, and life continuing. It means that the Earth spins and the sun shines and all is well. It means that the cosmic dance continues unfettered.
Maybe that’s how we should look at our hectic lives. Because no matter who we are, it’s hard to slow down. Those precious moments of rest and nothingness are precious because they’re so few. I think that’s how it should be.
We can’t help but to move, but we can help how we move.
We can make sure our comings and goings are ordained by God Himself, that our actions, however small, are made as a prayer to Him and a help to others.
Yes. That’s it. That’s what we need.
Not less moving, but better moving.
That the cosmic dance continues unfettered.
The night my son gave up
October 28, 2009 by Billy Coffey · 12 Comments
At five, my son is quickly learning the ways of the world when it comes to dealing with others. It’s a necessary skill. Maybe the most necessary.
He knows that a crying fit will likely get him nothing but a slap on the rear, and he knows he can sweet talk his mother into just about anything he wants. He also knows his father is a much tougher sell. I’m not much on sweet talking. So with me he tends to approach things from a more practical standpoint.
“Dad,” he said the other day, “I think I need a knife because you have a knife and I wanna be like you.”
So he got a knife. Plastic, of course. But still one that’s worthy of both his father and MacGyver.
He’s slick, I tell you. Very.
The way to deal with God has come much harder for my son, mostly because he can’t seem to figure out how to get what he wants. I’ve spent the last few weeks as a spectator to this getting-to-know-you process. I’m not butting in. Not yet. Some things are best learned on your own, even when you’re a kid…
I’m at highcallingblogs.com today, and if you’d like to read more, just follow this link. I’ll see you over there. Have a great day, everyone!
The second biggest lie
July 13, 2009 by Billy Coffey · 39 Comments
Being a parent of young children is all about deciding which parts of the world you let in now and which you keep out as long as possible.
For instance.
News? Out. There is no good news. News is meant to depress people. But Sunday morning comics is in. Comics are meant to make you laugh.
Hannah Montana? No. Phineas and Ferb? Yes.
Pro wrestling? Not hardly. But baseball can always provide both quality entertainment and much education.
You get the idea.
This applies to all things spiritual as well. God and Jesus and angels are definitely in, but the darker side of theology goes unmentioned. My kids don’t know what hell is. Or demons. They don’t understand that there are some people in this world who hate their faith and them for having it. The world is a nasty place. I figure part of my job for now is to do all I can to keep that nastiness away. They’ll find out about it all sooner or later.
And maybe sooner.
Our nighttime routine was interrupted yesterday evening by this inquiry from my daughter: “Daddy, who’s Satan?”
The question caught me by surprise. If hell and demons were temporarily off limits, then certainly Satan was, too. Seven-year-olds have fantastic imaginations. Having the thought of a horned and pitchfork-tailed demon rolling around in her mind would make for some long nights.
But what could I tell her? That Satan is the embodiment of evil? That he is darkness so thick that you had to brush it away with a hand? That he is a fallen angel who prowls the earth in search of souls to murder?
No way.
“Daddy?” she said again.
“Um…” I said. “Well, Satan is (someone? something?) bad.”
“The baddest?”
“Yes, the baddest.”
She thought about that and said, “What makes him the baddest?”
“The Bible says he’s a liar,” I told her.
“Daddy, everybody lies,” she retorted. “Even me.”
I decided not to pursue that last little bit of information and instead file it away for later. I really wanted to know what she had lied about.
“But he’s the worst liar ever,” I said.
More thinking. “What’s the worst lie he tells?”
“That God doesn’t love you.”
“I know God loves me, Daddy,” she said.
“That’s good. But maybe one day you’ll start thinking that isn’t true. If that happens, then you just remember that’s just a big, fat lie.”
She nodded and then asked, “What’s the second?”
“The second what?”
“What’s the second biggest lie he tells?”
I opened my mouth to answer, and then closed it. What’s the second biggest lie? I had no idea. I’d never really thought about it. To me, there had always been the first and then the rest. Ranking them beyond that seemed a little unnecessary.
But as I sat there and stared into her eyes, I thought about my life and all the lies I had been told. And then I thought about the lies we’ve all been told.
The best falsehoods are the ones that aren’t told to us as much as they are felt by us. One we accept as truth because that’s what the evidence states.
Those we fall for every time.
It’s easy to lose sight of who we are. Our mistakes and regrets are piled upon one another as a monument to our failure. Stacked high up, blocking the sun. And the Son. It’s hard to see the light when you’re standing in your own shadow.
We carry so much, don’t we? So much knowledge of not only what we’ve done, but what we’re capable of doing. That bad in us is so much easier to see than the good. We dwell upon the depths to which we can plumb but never give thought to the heights to which we can ascend.
There is a holy spark within us all. The thumbprint of the Almighty is stamped upon our hearts. There is a righteous power within us all to rise above where and who we are to become better and more. Too often we limp through our days when we should walk upright, all because we deny the great truth of our existence—we are more than we appear.
“Daddy,” my daughter said again, “what’s the second biggest lie?”
I tucked her beneath the blankets and kissed her forehead.
“That we are all ordinary,” I said.
I’m a writer whose first novel, Snow Day, will be published by FaithWords in 2010.
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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