WE'RE IMPORTANT TO ONE ANOTHER

There are times in the lives of each and every one of us when we begin to feel that we are not all that important in the grand scheme of things. Why we feel that way we sometimes have no idea, but we feel that way anyone. It’s a little discouraging and certainly disconcerting especially when we believe that every person is important and no one is unimportant in God’s eyes and, of course, the only eyes that really count.

The truth is that we fill important places in each other’s lives. Even more, we don’t realize that are doing so when we are doing so. In the same way others fill important places in our lives. Sometimes we are quite aware that that is what we are doing as when we are present through their suffering or filling some needs that the other cannot do so without outside help.

Again, there are times we are simply unaware of how much our presence is important to another even if that presence is only in passing, especially if it is only in passing. A kind word, a friendly smile, a nod of simple recognition can make another person’s day just as a word or a smile or a nod sometimes makes our day. It doesn’t take much to uplift another or be uplifted by another.

Perhaps that is why we take these little gestures of recognition of the other for granted if we take them for anything at all. It seems that it is only when we have been uplifted by a kindly word or nod or smile that we realize just how important the person who uplifted us at that moment filled an important place in our life. It had been an empty space as we had been feeling a real emptiness. And now the void was filled.

Our lives are full of filling those empty spaces in the lives of others and having our emptiness filled by others, mostly in passing, but filling nevertheless. It’s not as if we walk around consciously looking for people whose lives we can fill by our very presence. Rather it is the recognition that we fill important places in the lives of others just by our very presence – and they do the same for us.

Nor is it important that we know that we have done so for another. The other may tell us that our smile or nod or word really meant something without having to explain what that something was. We understand because we have been on the receiving end of another’s kind smile that did so much to brighten our day even as we are at a loss to explain how that smile brightened our day.

What was important and what is always important is that we never forget just how we fill important places in the lives of others just by being who we are called to be: kind and caring people, people who have known emptiness but who have had that emptiness filled by the kindly actions of another. Little loving actions mean a lot, always have and always will. They are never unimportant and never will be.

SEEING THE WORLD THROUGH YOUR EYES

There is an old Indian saying that in order to understand another person we have to walk in that person’s moccasins. We have to walk the walk before we talk the talk: talk as if we understand that person. We know that to be true and we know that to be impossible. We can only walk in our own moccasins/shoes. We also know that a lot of living has gone into those moccasins, living that determines so much about who that person is at the moment we might want to walk in those shoes.

Walking in another’s shoes would only be the beginning of our trying to understand that person. We would need to go deeper. We would need to see the world through that person’s eyes. Again, like those shoes, those eyes have seen so very, very much, so much that what those eyes now see is colored by all that they have seen in the past. That is why a person born blind almost always has a better picture of the world he or she has never seen than of the world we have seen.

That is why when we begin to wonder why other people act the way they do, the reason is found in the miles they have walked and the sights they have seen and experienced. Their life, like everyone’s lives, has been colored by everything they have seen and experienced up to this very day.

And so has ours. Sometimes we forget that about others and sometimes we forget that about ourselves. We have become who we are because of our past. It would be good if we could actually walk in another’s shoes and see though that person’s eyes and thus understand that person. But would it not be even better if we would pause for a while and remember all those places our shoes have taken us, all those sights our eyes have seen?

It would be impossible to make a total recall, of course. But the really memorable moments would stand out and they would give us a clue to why we have become the person we have become. The past good and the past bad are all part of our making and becoming and they are important. They won’t change who we are, but they will help us understand both the good and the bad about us – for all have both and bad about us.

So what does all this mean? To me it means that even as much as I might want to walk in another’s shoes and see through that person’s eyes in order to try to understand that person’s actions, it means that it is even more important that I understand what in the past has brought me to today. It will help me understand the good that I do and, hopefully, to change a behavior that is rooted in the past but can and must be changed for the better.

Not being able to walk in another’s shoes or see through that person’s eyes does not allow us give that person a pass on present wrong behavior no does it give others a pass on our wrong behavior because they can’t walk in our shoes or see with our eyes. Understanding bad behavior is only a start. The hard part is the changing it for the good.

AN HONOR AND A PRIVILEGE

This past Friday I was home alone for several hours. Arlena was in Maryland Carmine-sitting – our youngest daughter’s Shih Tzu – while she and her husband and our youngest grandson (Carter) where frolicking on Myrtle Beach. Our Subaru was at the dealer getting its 60,000-mile-checkup. And, oh, by the way, a new set of tires if we wanted it to pass inspection. Why not? What’s another $550 (plus tax, of course) added on to the cost of the checkup – which is going to be more than the cost of the tires? I mean, it’s only money and we do get some cash back from using our credit card.

So while I was waiting for all this to be done, which would take a good five hours or more, I Googled the John McCain Funeral. It was almost four hours of being uplifted, renewed, with lots of smiles and tears. The Service – the dignified liturgy, the wonderful music, the military pomp and circumstance, and especially the words of those who spoke, all of it—made me proud to be an American.

It was a delayed honor and privilege to watch the celebration of the life of a man who epitomized greatness: a flawed man, like all of us, to be sure, but who, in spite of those flaws and failings and shortcomings, made us a better people. It was also a needed reminder of who we are as a country: a diverse group of people, a melting pot, a salad bowl, of all sorts and conditions of people, each and every one of us who, from not too far back and from way, way back, came here from somewhere else to make us what we are: a model to the rest of the world.

The Service gave me hope, which sometimes these days seems so tenuous, that the divisions that now plague us and which seem to be delightfully fostered by our elected leaders, can somehow be put aside to work for the betterment of everyone and not just for the select few. It gave me a little more confidence that those gathered in the National Cathedral could not and did not disagree with John McCain’s vision and would begin to do the work, the very hard work, needed to make that vision a reality.

As Abraham Lincoln once observed, there are better angels among us. John McCain was one of them. But those angels live in each one of us. We, each and every one of us, have the honor and the privilege to do what we know we need to do to make this vision come to fulfillment. John McCain did what he could do. The speakers reminded us of that in no uncertain and unapologetic terms. They also reminded us that that vision and that responsibility did not die with John McCain.

Some might say that that is an impossibility. John McCain, as those who knew him well attested, would use some very colorful and, in the case, appropriate language, to tell us that we are wrong. There will always be disagreements. That is a fact of life. But there need not be the divisiveness that now seems so pervasive. We can do better because we are better. And so we must. It is are honor and privilege to do so.

I DO/DON'T UNDERSTAND

Why is it, I often wonder, that some of the best people I know, some of the kindest and most caring people around, seem to suffer so much, whether physically, mentally, spiritually or a combination of some or all? Then, on the other hand, are those people who are outwardly not so good, obviously sinful and selfish people, who seemed to have life by the tail, who have an abundance of the world’s goods and could care less about their actions and the harm those actions inflict on innocent people.

It just doesn’t seem fair especially when I truly believe that when we die here on earth, we are immediately alive with God forever: no hell for those who seem to deserve it and no purgatory for the rest of us, sinners that we all are. Thus, contemplating Hitler walking alongside Francis of Assisi in eternity is sometimes both hard to imagine and even more difficult to accept, but I still believe it to be true.

In many ways it has little or nothing to do with The Problem of Evil, to capitalize the phrase and to note that that issue is one of the great God-questions. If God is All-Good, and if God is All-Powerful, why does God allow bad things to happen to good people let alone bad things to happen to anyone? The answer, of course, is free will. Without it we are robots. With it we can do all manner of evil and often do.

The real issue is why some people suffer more than they deserve. Yes, we all bring suffering upon ourselves when we do that which we know we should not do. When we eat too much, drink too much, drive to fast, place ourselves foolishly in harm’s way, we deserve the pain and suffering that follows. But does anyone deserve to be ravaged by cancer or become blind or deaf or, well, the list is long?

To say that our reward will be great in heaven if we suffer in such a way does not make the suffering any less painful. Undeserved punishment is still undeserved and the promise of a later reward is of little or no consolation in the meantime. In the meantime, in the here-and-now, we believers are confronted with God-questions that we cannot answer, with situations that we do and don’t understand.

What we are left with is a faith being tested sometimes every minute of every day. We may be tempted at times to chuck it all in and determine that there is no God, that heaven is foolishness, that when we are done with this life, we are done. Sometimes that seems to make so much sense especially when there seems to be no logical or sensible or even sane answer to our questions.

But we can’t go there. Something inside us says that even though we do not understand why things happen the way they do, we still believe. Yes, the belief gets shaken to its very core sometimes, and rightly so. But we hang on. And why do we hang on? Because, very simply, we won’t let go of God and God won’t let go of us. That’s why.