YOU HAVE TO LEARN TO FLOWER WHERE GOD HAS SOWN YOU

YOU HAVE TO LEARN TO FLOWER WHERE GOD HAS SOWN YOU

(These thoughts are added to three times a week and cover a diverse number of subjects and insights)

Be a dandelion? Bloom in the face of people who want to dig you up and throw you away. That is the dandelion you know.

On every mountaintop there are trees growing out of rocks because they have latched on to the tiniest piece of opportunity; a few gathered grains of soil. And even in the desert an oasis rises green and vibrant against a backdrop of desolation.

And yes, there are a thousand trees that never grow and acre after acre of sand that produces no oasis. And yes, millions bemoan where they find themselves on the field of life and shrivel up and die, while others do prosper with no more than starlight when what they would prefer was the bright light of high noon.

Not where you live but how you live where you live. Not what is your job that is the worst job in the whole wide world but what do you do with the hours away from your job. Looking for people to love you or looking for people to love.

Write a letter to your future self. It will help you to gauge more closely who you are and how you got to be what presently you are. Apply the positives and keep them alive. Learn from the negatives and bury them.

It is called a personal history book and everyone is in the process of writing one by how they live and love and shape their being.

Many years ago, from time to time, a young man used to speak briefly to our mid day luncheon club. He did so from a twisted, sitting position that arthritis had frozen his body into. He could not have stood if his life had depended on it. He spoke from a field of life not of his choosing, to spread beauty where otherwise people would see only the ugliness of deformity.

Carl Sandberg once described a very unusual man. He wrote, “Not often in the story of mankind does a man arrive on earth who is both steel and velvet, who is hard as rock and soft as drifting fog, (but) in the mixed shame and blame of the immense wrongs of two crashing civilizations, often with nothing to say, he said nothing, slept not at all, and on occasions he was seen to weep in a way that made weeping appropriate, decent, majestic.” His name, of course, was Abraham Lincoln.

On November 29, 1623, William Bradford, Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, made an official Thanksgiving Proclamation. It was their 3rd year in the new country and all had not been going well. Nearly half the Pilgrims had died and it didn’t look as if things were going to get better any time soon. But what did Governor Bradford do? He proclaimed that the survivors be grateful and thankful, and not allow themselves to be overwhelmed with complaining.

It may have been an over-extension of optimism, but hurray for over-extension.

C. K. Chesterton said there are two ways to have enough: one is to get more, the other is to desire less. What I am saying is that if you really want to be happy you need to fall in love with your own life as it is over and over again. To search out and polish up the silver lining on your clouds. To look up at the night sky and see both stars and darkness, but allow yourself to be over-whelmed by the twinkling lights rather than by the deep dark blackness of outer space.

Sometimes, because life has been unkind, we are like a seed – surrounded by darkness. It is then we are truly challenged to grow toward the light.