Well, Missouri’s trademark heat and humidity’s here with a bullet. Why is it that wherever you travel and mention you’re from Missouri, someone will shoot you a snide, knowing smile and say “oh, yeah misery”! Wiping the sweat as we struggle to grasp the humor in that comment, we find ourself sitting here this morning under the beautiful River Tree, once again mulling over the idea of and importance of faith in our lives.
How can it and how should it impact our individual lives and our increasingly fraught and seemingly chaotic and dysfunctional society? The old one would argue, in just about every possible way.
Maybe by treating everyone; our spouses, children, neighbors and yep, strangers with respect. Always looking carefully and thoroughly for their value, their potential, their inevitable worth in this world. Never assuming, presuming, disregarding or discarding them, regardless of preconceptions or appearances.
A central precept of real faith and just from intellectually assessing the reality of our human existence, we’re forced to embrace the fact that our individual lives are incredibly brief. Not to put too fine a point on it, but we’re just here for a cosmic blink of an eye and, if we don’t grab hard at every sliver of that brief time we have and wring every possible value from it, we’re pretty much waisting our time here.
Deeply and consciously respecting others opens us up to truly and fully living. And the next step and hold onto your shorts; it’s a darned tough one, is to practice trust. Cynics, the jaded, and I’d label them the self-defeated in life, will scoff and tell us as they shake their pointy heads and smile, that trusting is just naive. I’d say it’s what’s required of us to open ourselves to learning; about others, about life, about ourselves, about anything and everything in this finite, but increasingly complex existence. Only then can we determine who and what’s truly and ultimately trustworthy and untrustworthy.
And even then, I’d kinda recommend that, as we take on more learning, we go back and reassess what we initially have assessed as untrustworthiness.
Only at that point can we begin to learn in depth from and about those people and institutions which exhibit some level of trustworthiness. And the more we learn, the more we want to, the more useful questions we can ask, the more pleasure, fulfillment and yep, joy we can get from that learning; until, as we gain a level of actual adulthood and real functional maturity, we’re inevitably drawn to particular people, causes and vocations that we come to value, joy in and feel motivated to commit more and more of our time, energy and learning toward.
And folks, the old codger’d tell you, that’s what we call “love”. It ain’t infatuation and it’s just about the farthest thing from what we might label “carnal”. But, when it’s truly open, it’s just about as close to embracing eternity as a human being can get on this so finite earth.
So how does that fit in with our perception of life today, our morality, ethics, values, culture, politics, etc.?
Pretty simple. If we value and live the above, every day; we embrace living a productive family life of love, respect and commitment. We embrace valuing lifelong learning. Above everything we embrace valuing and insisting on truth and respect in all our dealings on this earth, whether they be personal, business related or political.
We embrace respecting, valuing and commiting to lifting up every one of our fellow human beings and this so fragile and perishable home we all share.
Hey, sitting here searching for some type of cooling breeze under the sturdy River Tree, the old codger’d remind us all that our time here is in fact incredibly brief and maybe while we’re here, we might want to embrace just that type and level of faith.
