Month: December 2025

My wall of wisdom

We only have a limited time on this world, and no one knows the number of days we’re allotted. That’s why it’s important to make every day amazing — but be silly sometimes.

This may be the most profound stretch of wall in my house — those two exhortations framing the clock, which a craftsman happens to have made from one of the discs from Will the Circle Be Unbroken.

I’ve written about this before, but it bears repeating, especially since I don’t look up at that spot on the wall nearly often enough.

So many times a day will go by without my making any effort to make it amazing, or a week will go by and I haven’t been silly, not once … or at least not deliberately so. We humans are sillier than we realize most of the time.

I try to remember, when I wake, to say, “Thank you, Lord, for this most amazing day,” but then I forget to play my role in ensuring its amazingness.

The dogs do their part to remind me that being silly is part of a healthy life. We take ourselves so seriously sometimes. Elwood P. Dowd’s mother wisely said, “In this world, Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant.’ Elwood told his friend, “Well, for years I was oh so smart. I recommend pleasant.”

I recommend pleasant, too. We have a surplus of smarties in this world and not enough pleasantness. 

And what is pleasant? Well, the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Those things are the heart of being pleasant, I think.

Be that world, not this one

In Stephen Pastis’ comic strip Pearls Before Swine the other day, ever-optimistic Pig is writing a letter.

“Dear The World as I Know It,” he writes, “Be the world as I envision it. P.S. And please have ice cream grow on trees.”

He turns to Rat and says, “Never hurts to ask.”

It’s a variation on the exhortation often attributed to Gandhi: “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” If you seek a world in which more people love their neighbors, well then, love your neighbors. 

Someone has already envisioned a world where ice cream grows on trees — a simple search found a couple of companies that sell ice cream created from coconut cream. I think Pig envisioned something a bit more literal, but you take what you can get.

Of course, our world, the sum total of what the other 7 billion should are doing, is pretty much out of our individual control, but we have total control of how we react and interact with that world.

Oh, I was sorely tempted a couple of times yesterday. Facebook friends share their political posts, and I agree with some and intensely disagree with others. I started typing a response to one of the especially silly ones and then thought of Pig’s letter to the world as he knows it.

In the world I envision, people are free to say and believe what they want and, as long as they’re not trying to run my life, let it be. And so I deleted my response — I wasn’t going to change my friend’s mind anyway.

And ice cream growing on trees is a more interesting subject.

It should be easy

Someone noted all the terrible things happening in the world but said, meaning to be comforting, “This world is not our home; eternity with our Savior awaits.”

It’s all well and good that we shall not perish but have eternal life, in whatever form that takes.

But as long as we’re here on this waiting station, shouldn’t we be as kind to one another as we can?

I’m closing in on the end of my 73rd year in this world that is not my home, and I still have never fathomed war or meanness or spite; I don’t understand violence or hatred. Why does it seem so hard to love one another, especially among those who love God?

Come to think of it, loving others is often easier than you might expect — perhaps it’s the forces of evil in the world who spread the lie that loving one another is hard.