Translating a World on the Edge

I’m polishing up a sequel to my first novel, A Hunger in the Heart. In the first chapter of the sequel,  Coleman, the main character, sixteen years old at the book’s beginning,  is preparing to leave home for a boy’s school. If you’ve read the first novel, you know the wisdom of the family’s gardener, Fig:

“We got stuff to talk about before you go off on your own, ‘bout the ways of the world.”

     Coleman laughed. “What do you know about the ways of the world? You’ve never been anyplace but here.”

     “Don’t matter. Here’s got the same worries you gonna find anywhere else. Best to get you prepared.”

The point is the root of all problems follow us  anywhere we go,  because most of our problems are caused by the weaknesses within us. They are humanity’s weaknesses. Catholics call them the seven deadly sins:

Pride, Greed, Envy, Lust, Anger, Sloth, and Gluttony.

And they are the way of the world. Just look around.

Each of the seven deadly sins is a form of Idolatry-of-Self, and we all know people who may be in danger of destroying their lives in selfish ways through one or more of them.

Except, just as we have capability of sin, human beings also have the capability of virtue. The seven virtues are:

Faith, Hope, Love, Prudence, Temperance, Courage, and Justice.

Are these virtues the way of our world today? Good news; many times they are.

Because whenever there is great evil, virtuous people will fight. Sadly, the reverse is also true. If a person is known to have virtue, there is usually someone to tear him/her down–even to crucify him.

So, like my characters Coleman and Fig, each of us  are touched by conflicting ‘ways of the world.’ And the way we choose to take will make an eternal difference, in our own life and in the lives of others.

The Fourth of July has passed, but today, I’m feeling even more patriotic than on that day a few weeks ago. In the words of my Daddy,  who was awarded the Purple Heart and Bronze Star in WWII— some people in today’s news are “walking on the fightin’ side of me.

…Because I was taught to love America, not to bad-mouth her.

…Because I was taught, and daily declared at school, The Pledge of Allegiance to The United States of America.

…Because I was taught respect for America’s Flag.

…Because I was taught that I was blessed to be an American.

…Because I was taught the history of my country, (in Fourth Grade) and how she courageously fought for her freedom, expressed in the Declaration of Independence, particularly its second sentence:  We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

The key words in the above statements are: I was taught. As were many of you. So what’s happened?

Are  today’s children–our children and grandchildren– really taught the correct history of America? Are they being given  positive, or negative, impressions of the wonderful country in which they live? Which rights will have been taken away from them by the time they reach adulthood?

No, America isn’t perfect, but if she doesn’t always live up to the principles created for her, then it’s no one’s fault but ours—each one of us. Freedom is everybody’s job. We simply cannot leave it to others to trample on. And this is what is happening today when it comes to :

Religious Freedom  (which is being usurped by our own government)

Economic Freedom ( we’ve lost 200 years of ranking as the most prosperous country in the world to not even being the top ten today)

Freedom of Speech (think IRS targeting)

Freedom from tyranny (The Framers of the Constitution created a federal government of limited and enumerated powers – leaving everything else to the states and “the people.”

And on and on.

Check out your rights, and think about what is happening to some of them:

http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/billofrights

The thing is, we have to KNOW what’s going on. We just can’t get too busy and ignore it, or one day we’ll look up from our busyness and wonder what happened to our America and our rights as Americans.

My family lived nearly ten years in Scottsboro, Alabama, a small, mountainous, and beautiful town off the Tennessee River. I wonder if neighborhoods like the one I experienced in Scottsboro are able to exist anymore. Today, it’s so important to keep your children close at hand. But then, our children were free to go most anywhere; roaming the woods, riding miles on bicycles, paddling around Roseberry Creek near the neighborhood dock where we had cook-outs, and lots of boating, skiing and swimming (while watching out for cotton mouth moccasins, of course.)

My cousin and her family lived steps away from us, and so did the finest neighbors anywhere. We were blessed to be there at the time we were, with those people, in that place of beauty. Our children loved it, especially the first three. Our last two children were babies then, born when we were living in Scottsboro, but my older children had many adventures with their friends. It wasn’t necessarily what they were doing, but who they were doing it with that made them happiest.

My oldest son was about nine years old when he came to me one night after we’d gotten home from a party with neighbors at the dock. Always a thoughtful child, he liked to size things up. That night was no exception. “Mama, this was a good day. In fact, I really think this was the best day of my life.”

What would make him say that? He was a child, for one thing. And as a child he lived in the present. He did not look back and grieve over something that happened yesterday, and he wasn’t troubled about the future. What affected him most was a particular day, a day he appreciated for what it had given him.

Isn’t this what gives all of us our best days–an appreciation of the present moment? If only we could take that as seriously as a child does.

Today is my oldest son’s birthday.(Happy Birthday, Chris!!) He is, of course, an adult. And as an adult, I’m certain his idea of what constitutes a “best” day has changed, as it does for all of us. As adults, more and more bad days seem to appear on the plates of our individual lives, days we have to deal with that are not so happy as a youngster’s day on the dock.

However, as adults, we have a distinct advantage over a young child. When a bad day happens, we can see it for what it is and learn from it. Often, it’s the worst day of our life that lets us know what our best day really is. But most important, as adults, we realize that tomorrow can produce just the opposite sort of day.  And this is a divine virtue we receive through the grace of God, called hope.

Hope is what keeps us going. Hope is the possibility of change.  And if we honestly want to ‘size things up,’ and if we truly trust in what we say we believe, then we’ll realize that with hope, even the worst day has power enough to  become the best day of our life.

We’ve all heard the advertising slogan “What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas.” In other words, no one will bad-mouth a person for what they do there.

Having been part of the advertising community for nearly twenty years, I think it’s a great slogan for a place where people often lose their inhibitions and would like to keep that secret. But it’s just that–an advertising slogan. It attracts with a promise, a wish, but no one honestly believes it.

But how does that slogan work on a personal level? Have you ever been instructed to “keep it to yourself” after a friend or family member confided in you? Yet, you didn’t? Sadly most of us are guilty.

Or maybe we know people who keep nothing to themselves. Maybe they can’t wait to spout off all your business, as well as the business of everyone they know, too? Worse, maybe they even maliciously make false statements to injure another’s reputation. Many people’s lives have been destroyed because they were falsely accused of something they had nothing to do with.

We ought to think about that–ruining other people’s lives can definitely come from bad-mouthing–whether what we say is a lie, or the truth.

So here’s another “Slogan” one that you can believe.
God’s Commandment: Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.

Shouldn’t we remember that those words are not a suggestion, but meant to be followed?

The Bell and The Switch

As a child, I didn’t want to hear The Bell. It resonated through the pine trees of the woods where I was building the perfect straw house; it caught me dunking a glass jar in the creek to catch the biggest tadpole I’d ever seen; it caused me to brake my Blue Schwinn bike on a red dirt road after I’d peddled all the way up a hill so I could fly down it again. The Bell instructed me to stop all that. The Bell meant, “Come home.”

A child, of course, comes into the world with irritating abilities. One of them is the ability to close her ears to what she doesn’t want to hear. A child wants to finish the straw house. She wants to capture the tadpole. She wants the excitement of flying down a hill, fast as the wind. A child wants what she wants. Still, The Bell calls. And in the course of its annoying jangle, a child considers consequence.

For me, the consequence of not answering The Bell was The Switch. At first, I was able to choose The Switch. My mother, the bell ringer, pointed a stiff finger. “You will obey the rules of this house. Now, go get me a switch off the Redbud.” This command, I chose to hear. Except I brought back the wimpiest branch I could find. When I laughed and told her it tickled, she resorted to finding The Switch on her own. A little stronger, a little longer, it laid as a symbol of consequence on the top shelf of the bookcase in our den.

As adults, we are busy. Obeying the rules, or even standing by our own beliefs, is a hard thing to do. Today, the rules are watery; we dilute them to suit ourselves. Our beliefs are spineless; we rarely consider their depth. And sometimes we call consequences of our own making, ‘unfair.’ We spout off platitudes, meant to show that we’re ‘okay’ people, but we don’t realize that we’re called to be much more than just ‘okay.’ The Apostle Peter (2 Peter 1:4) says that we “participate in the Divine Nature.” No matter who or what we are, we’re called to this holiness. And that’s a bell-ringer with consequences.

We can recognize, or not, that we’re part of the Divine. Like a child hearing a bell she doesn’t want to hear, we can close our ears. We can ignore the consequences. As for me, I can still see The Switch on the bookcase, and hear The Bell calling me home.