If Not Now…
But I don’t give advice, I just tell stories…
I don’t know anyone who actually takes advice, so there’s that. And especially when they don’t ask for it, or especially when they don’t think they need it.
Thinking you need advice is something that happens as you wonder why everything has gone wrong and you want a do-over to get it right. I know this—I was young and foolish… and have been such since I was young and foolish.
One of my go-to phrases after Old Fuzzy and I were married was let’s ask your folks what they think, so it wasn’t that we didn’t ask. Maybe we should have asked more on several other topics than we did.
On the other hand, we did use scripture as another go-to example. Still, when you’re in your twenties and thirties you are like a wanderer in a blizzard. You feel your way carefully lest you slide off the precipice.
I’d always wanted to raise a garden when young. My mother-in-law was a treasure trove of how to can and preserve food as well as how to raise a garden. I was blessed with her instructions in those areas.
I’m sure my grandma knew much more than I asked her about, but still growing up around her I picked up many helps for cooking and baking. We always said our grandma made the best cinnamon rolls, and that was only slightly true.
We have a cynical saying that covers most of our lives, “she did the best she could with what she had to work with.” I can build on Grandma’s recipe and use today’s ingredients that she didn’t have or couldn’t afford to use and I can improve on her concoctions.
In some ways, it was a combination of the best of both worlds. My grandmother’s older ways with a mother’s insight that I never got from my own mother. The thought has passed through my mind on occasion that I couldn’t visualize my mother working in a garden. The whole sweating thing would have been a total turn off I think.
My grandfather spoke on occasions of the huge garden they raised in their younger years. He once pointed to the hillside just north of the house and said, “We used to have that whole hillside in garden.”
That would have been a large garden. I was amazed when he told me that, partly because they weren’t a young family when they purchased that farm and that was a goodly portion of ground for a garden.
Their lives seemed to be a hodge-podge of nonrelated events. Or related events but not related in any logical manner. If you could take the thoughts of—We bought a car and there will be four candles and ten balloons. And find a relationship in any of those thoughts at face value.
It is a strange world we live in for sure. I read a piece lately headlined, How long is forever? And how soon is never? The gist of the thoughts were making long-range plans is like building castles in the clouds.
Because we live in a short-term world where we deal mostly with the short term, no matter how many down-the-road plans we make there are too many get-in-the-ways that happen and those long-range plans are more likely to take forever and actually never come to pass.
So it is with most of us and our lives. We make the plans of the heart thinking “someday I will…” and maybe we even start out on that plan. Maybe we start education in the support of our someday adventure making advances toward our goal.
A few years ago, in 1995 apparently, there was a movie, Mr. Holland’s Opus. If I remember correctly it began with a very young couple. The man was a young musician with dreams of writing a famous opus and becoming rich and famous but on the way…
As the movie review says, on the way to changing lives— of all the lives he changed the life he changed the most was his own. It showed how he worked at teaching and reaching out to his students, and he was so busy his opus was put on the shelf until the surprising ending of the movie.
I wrote this the other day and I believe it bears repeating because even though we’ve become really smart in this generation, we’ve also become really dumb. “Most people raise children while working at the important things in life, not realizing that raising children is the most important thing in life.”
Our next generation is our legacy and we’re allowing that next generation, our legacy to be destroyed. If they can’t sacrifice them to Satan physically they’ll tear them down and sacrifice them spiritually. Our God is not just a God of the long term someday, he’s the God of today. The God of the here and now.
Zechariah 4:
8) Moreover the word of the LORD came unto me, saying,
9)The hands of Zerubbabel have laid the foundation of this house; his hands shall also finish it; and thou shalt know that the LORD of hosts hath sent me unto you.
10) For who hath despised the day of small things? for they shall rejoice, and shall see the plummet in the hand of Zerubbabel with those seven; they are the eyes of the LORD, which run to and fro through the whole earth.
