A TIME OF BLOOMING

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                                                      Luke 10:27

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. 

This is the first and greater commandment. 

And the second is like unto it;

love your neighbor as yourself.

                A woman at a worship service in Uganda kept singing praises and saying prayers of thanks for the shoes upon her feet.  She went on and on and on.  She didn’t give thanks because they were of the latest fashion, or because she particularly liked the color.  No, she felt very blessed to simply have shoes – any shoes - for many at the service had no shoes at all. And a tear began to trickle down the cheek of the missionary’s face, for he realized that while he had given God thanks for many things, he had never thanked Him for shoes.  He realized that he had always taken it for granted that he would have shoes.  But now he understood that even things we take for granted are blessings we sometimes do not allow ourselves to be aware of.   

A wise and ancient guru had a disciple who had come so far in wisdom and understanding that he decided to leave him on his own.  His disciple lived quite simply in a tiny hut made of mud; sustained himself each morning after devotions by daily begging for bread and each evening washed his loincloth and hung it out to dry.

One morning, he went out to get his loin cloth and found that overnight rats had gnawed on it until only tattered shreds were left.  He therefore begged from those around him for another loin cloth, and they gladly gave him one for this was a holy man.  But remember, he was wise as well as a holy man so he then did what common sense demanded.  He got himself a cat.

But as often happens, one solution only serves up another problem.  Now he needed milk for his cat.   This became increasingly difficult to obtain so naturally he now acquired a cow.  Ah, complications increased.  Now he needed fodder for the cow, so he decided to till and plant the ground around his hut.  And soon he was so very, very busy tending cat, and cow, and crops that he had no time for contemplation.

Wisdom was soon served again.  He hired servants to tend his farm and give him help in other ways.  He began to wonder at some of his recent decisions but what else could he do?

Daily he was becoming more weary, for now there was so much to care for and worry about that he consulted himself in a question and answer time.  What can I do?  The answer that came was obvious.  Obtain more wealth and let others work and worry for him.  Soon he was the wealthiest man in the village.

At just about this time his guru was traveling in the region again and stopped by to see his disciple.  He was overwhelmed by all the changes that had been made.  The mud hut had been replaced by a well built home surrounded by so much land that the once little plot was now a vast estate.  There were busy servants scurrying about.  Everywhere a kind of buzz about the place.

The guru paused and then asked, “What is the meaning of all of this?”

“You won’t believe this, master,” came back the reply. “It was the only way I could keep my loincloth.”

What am I saying?  Perhaps life as we know it is an Eden we have created, or is it by chance an Eden we have reworked until it is not so much an Eden any more.  It isn’t that simple, but then maybe it is.  Or as Thoreau once said, “We are happy in proportion to what we can learn to live without.”  However, if no matter how much we have, we are never satisfied…now there is a different matter.

(TO BE CONTINUED)