Skip to main content

31 CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE: A seed won’t grow into a flower in a day, no matter how hard you work

Teachers of small children often speak of certain skills being “developmental.” By this they mean that the acquisition of that skill will develop in time with the aging of the child, and that premature practicing to try to “force” its development will likely only frustrate parent and child. We used to read our kids one of Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad stories, The Garden, which made the same point in a very simple way: Toad planted seeds and kept yelling at them to grow, believing he could make them grow faster by his prompting. I’ve often thought that children’s story is aimed more at the parents reading the story than the children hearing it.

The obvious, but easy to forget, fact is that some things will only happen through hard work and some things will only happen with the passage of time and some things take both. Some things evolve gradually, and some in discernable stages, as represented in Shakespeare’s famous “All the World’s a Stage” monologue, Kierkegaard’s Stages on Life’s Way, Five for Fighting’s 100 Years, and many other works. It is important to work hard and apply yourself to developing your gifts and making a difference in the world where you can. But it is equally important to humbly accept the nature of things where the passage of time is what’s needed and any effort by you will be wasted energy, will frustrate you, and may damage relationships. And, getting back to gardening, without the patience to let things develop, it’s easy to pull something up, thinking it is a weed, only to later discover it was a beautiful flower that just needed more time.

These ideas are crystallized in the Serenity Prayer attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr:

God, grant me

The serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

Courage to change the things I can,

And wisdom to know the difference.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts

Preface

Before Tom Cruise, Matt Damon, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and even Clint Eastwood, there was John Wayne. The iconic action hero of my youth, “The Duke”, as he was sometimes called, was famous for fighting, shooting, and tough-talking his way through every movie to protect the abused and vanquish the bad guys, wherever they were. To me, his characters seemed a source of stability on which I could build my sense of right and wrong. I loved going to movies to see the most recent John Wayne film, and believed that anything John Wayne did was, by definition, good. He was a role model to me. And then an unsettling thing happened. There, in one of my favorite movies, The Duke was driving while clearly intoxicated. This was before MADD and SADD and national sensitivity to the dangers of drunk driving, but my awareness of the issue had been raised when someone very dear to me had almost been killed by a drunk driver. When that accident happened, I remember wondering why someone would risk lives—t...
Post a Comment
Read more

29 CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE: Don’t be tricked into singing along with lyrics just because the melody is good

It’s hard to understand the emotional effect of music—how soothing, relaxing, uplifting, terrifying, or electrifying a good tune can be. It is scary, however, how easy it is to sing along with virtually any lyrics if the tune is stuck in your head. I always try to understand song lyrics, get their message, and think about why the author wrote them—and often I conclude that the message and motive are inconsistent with my beliefs and perhaps dangerous. And yet, I regularly catch myself humming or playing the tune of such a song in my head, with the lyrics floating along either in my brain or on my lips. While music’s effect may be singular, other things can have similar effects: something or someone of great beauty, an eloquent essay or speaker, a good story or movie, and even a friend. Anything that causes you to let your guard down can have this power. You must be aware of it all of the time. Let me explain why I think it is dangerous to just “sing along” without thinking about t...
Post a Comment
Read more

36 CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX “To will one thing”: Section 8

The Struggle of finding and holding onto Faith The struggle in finding and holding faith seems to me natural, and perhaps healthy and necessary if it is to be your own. It also seems common: there many, many autobiographies of people who struggled and then found faith, but a few that I have found helpful are: •          Surprised by Joy by C.S. Lewis and the play and movie, “The Most Reluctant Convert” about his journey to faith •          Seven Story Mountain by Thomas Merton •          Confessions by Augustine of Hippo, •          A Man Called Peter by Catherine Marshall , and •          The Language of God by Francis Collins. I Did It For You , by Lecrae gives his story in the form of a song. There are also tons of books on faith and belief, especially in relation to reaso...
Post a Comment
Read more