What I Came to Say

I don’t mean to intrude, or maybe I do, because I can tell you’re unhappy with each other, and that won’t do, not in the long run, and not in the short run.

Short term, you’re angry and upset, and that’s no way to get along with one another. Long term, being hateful and mad for an extended period of time can wreak havoc on your innards. You’re literally killing yourself with all this rage.

Death is a sad fact of life, but you don’t want to rush it, and wishing death on someone is a good way to speed your own demise. All those juices you stir up hating will kill you eventually, sure as the day is long.

So what I came to say is treasure life while you have it. Try to understand people who see life differently from you — and if they hate you, don’t take it personally. They don’t understand you, either.

Life is tough and then you die — it’s the same for all of us. It’s a waste of energy to go around hating, and it’s toxic energy, too, so the main person your hate harms is your own self. Do you see how foolish anger and hate are yet?

A couple of thousand years ago, this one guy went around suggesting that the two most important things are to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself. Actually, he didn’t say it was a suggestion, he called them commandments. It’s not always easy — we don’t always understand God, and times like that it’s hard to love him — and don’t get me started on loving your neighbors. They can act in the most peculiar ways, or they can come after you and call you names or worse. But you know? The best thing to do at times like that is to love them anyway. They may not come around, but love heals. If they refuse to accept the healing, at least you will be more healthy.

Hey, look — the word “heal” is tucked inside the word “health.” It’s pronounced differently, but “health” must be what you get when you “heal.” Cool, huh?

I wrote a poem a few years back called “Love anyway.” Basically the message was to love no matter what the world throws at you. Stuff will still hurt, but if you return hurt with hurt, it just keeps hurting, back and forth. Love works better — really.

So that’s what I came to say: Love God and love your neighbor — and if I didn’t make it clear yet, that person you call an enemy (or maybe he claims you are his enemy) — that person is a neighbor, too. It’s not a perfect world, and it would not be a perfect world even if everyone loved God and loved their neighbors, but I’m pretty confident it would be a better world, and at the very least you will feel better if you do.

The time killer’s trial

I awake in darkness. Total darkness. This is not the darkness of night when, thanks to stars and moon, your eyes slowly adjust and you start to see shapes. No, this is darkness so dark I simply cannot see anything.

I don’t know how long I wait in vain for any sliver of light, but around the time I resign myself to the darkness, a bright spotlight is switched on, and just like that I trade the blindness of dark for the blindness of light.

“Will the defendant state his name?”

Defendant? Defendant?! I state my name.

“The charge is murder. How do you plea?”

“Murder?! I didn’t murder anyone.”

“Count 1. On July 13, 1983, you went to a mall arcade, inserted a quarter in the Qbert machine, and were still playing an hour and 15 minutes later, when your then-wife and her daughter finished their shopping and came to retrieve you.”

“I remember! Not sure of the date …”

“Count 2. On June 28 of this year, you watched all eight episodes of “Harlan Coben’s ‘I Will Find You’” beginning at 7 p.m. and went to bed shortly before 3:30 a.m.”

“Yes. So —?”

“Count 3. Yesterday, you sat down to write ‘the Great American Novel’ but instead played Free Cell, Klondike and Pyramid Solitaire for nearly two hours.”

“What about it? I was killing time like anyone else.”

“So you wish to plead guilty?”

“What?! No! ‘Killing time’ is just an expression.”

“Let the record show the defendant has confessed to killing time.”

“It’s just an expression!!”

“In this case, it’s literal, my friend,” the interrogator says not unkindly. “You have arrived at your allotted time. Whatever you hoped to accomplish in this world, you needed to have done by now, for you are done.”

I am suddenly haunted by the words I’d read in a book years ago and even blogged about — the author visiting a friend who had less than a week to live. The friend said he was ready to go but sometimes wished he had 10 more years.

The book was How, Then, Shall We Live? by Wayne Muller.

“What would you do with those years?” Muller had asked his friend.

The dying man thought for a moment. “I would be more kind,” he said. “I would live my life with kindness.”

I stand in despair before the judge, the tribunal, or wherever I’m standing and before whom.

“I wish I had more time,” I whisper.

A hand touches my shoulder. In the blinding light I see a gruesome scar on the hand.

“It’s all right, friend,” says the most gentle voice I’ve ever heard. “I will serve your sentence.”

I wake up in a sweat. Was that all just a dream? It seemed so real.

I decide to take no chances.

I pick up another book and find the mission statement I’d hoped to find.

“Clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against each other. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect harmony.” (Colossians 3:12-15, if you’re wondering.)

I see the scarred hand is still on my shoulder. No dream, then.

I thank the man who has agreed to serve my, erm, my time.

“I will do my best to use what’s left to me as if it is sacred, for I see now that it is,” I tell him.

“Works for me,” he says.

“Exactly,” says I.

Everything changes

I put Tom Petty’s Wildflowers on the turntable and realized he made that album more than 30 years ago. Thirty years is a long time, more than a third of a lifetime for most folks and more than an entire lifetime for more people than seems fair. And 30 years before that was my youth.

Long times ago, we didn’t know what we didn’t know, we heard the songs and the possibilities were endless. Somewhere along the way we began to slow our search for possibilities; even though they were still endless, we didn’t expect them anymore. This was the way things were, and we were not going to change them. That was life’s lie, of course. We always had the power. We have the power today.

This does not have to be “the way it is” — those hands right in front of your eyes have all the power you need to craft a different future, a future different from your present, and this morning is as good a time as any to start making that different place.

“Make a difference” — the very phrase says a difference is something you have to make, you have to build. Oh, a difference can be imposed on you — but where’s the joy in that? Why live in someone else’s world when you can make your own?

Make your own difference. Be the change you want to see. Thirty and sixty years ago, it all seemed so promising and possible, and somewhere along the way we became discouraged that we could change the world. But we did make changes, we built and we grew, and we preserved and conserved, and the world way out there didn’t seem to change much — until decades had gone by and so much was different, and one day we woke up and saw: We made that difference.

Bit by bit, one day at a time, year by year, change happens. Nothing lasts forever, not the sweetest happily-ever-after and not the most horrifying horror. All things must pass, and all things change. It’s up to you, it’s up to me, it’s up to us to work on making it a change for the better. We probably disagree on what “better” looks like, and so you be you and I’ll be me and let’s not try to mess with each other’s dreams except when they harmonize.

Thirty and sixty years on, so much is better. (My 2019 car runs well, and the odometer says 210,000 — sixty years ago our cars were done after 100K miles.) We have not solved hatred or tyranny, but lives are better because of those who would not stand for it.

And always, then and now, the power of change is right there at the end of your arms, in your heart, and behind your eyes.