- Not The Only One!
- Post#149
- 22 Aug 24
- ” The Book Report”
- Howdy!,
- It’s story time again, and once again I’m reminded that the story isn’t always about myself and that in fact , even most of the time when I think that it is, it’s still not about me.☺️☺️. I find myself at a place and time, where I’m learning new things about myself and they aren’t always beautiful things , that I’m just dying to embrace ☺️☺️. Often it comes down to knowing who we are. This may not be the best example , but take Christianity for instance. The majority of people can tell you what we stand against, but not what we say that we believe and stand for. It’s like we have taken a page from the democratic party play book and, we can scream and shout against perceived evils, but no fresh ideas about how to get things moving in a more positive direction, in the form of solutions. I don’t think that is an alignment that we wish to be associated with ☺️☺️.
- The truth be told this is very much a pattern for our individual lives as well . We have a belief system as to who we are, but it often comes down to much more about who we are not. I think that we may have some boundaries in our lives that define us. In some cases , depending on the person, it may be flimsy in nature, or they could stand as a defiant wall, much like the one that use to divide Germany for decades. These boundaries are often based on some core value or belief that we have. These are often about places we could never see our selves, or based on some experience that we most definitely don’t want to be repeated ☺️☺️.
- Sometimes they may be governed by some religious beliefs or perhaps by the advice of a wise parent. When it gets right down to it, it’s about things that we can’t see ourselves doing, but judge others for when they don’t posses the same , what we perceive as a moral fortitude. It can be almost anything. We see someone standing on a corner with a sign panhandlng, and we think to ourselves that , we just don’t know how they can do that? . It’s maybe a little bit prideful, but it’s so common and wide spread that it produces a lack of empathy in us, because we just never know if the need is legitimate or not. We tell ourselves that we would never get involved with a married person or slip into something illegal such as acquiring funds from our employer in an unscrupulous manner. In fact we have all sorts of things that say who we aren’t, and even the best of us, if there is such a thing , as the best of us☺️☺️, will occasionally find themselves in the deep waters of a scandal or some place that we never dreamed that we would find ourselves. Our lives are much more often defined by who we aren’t than who we are or want others to believe that we are.
- In my experiences, I have encountered plenty of people who do not know who they are themselves. They know their hopes and dreams. They know the person that they want you to believe that they are, whether that is confident, successful, self made, or just a good all around good person. There is part of ourselves that we will never know until we are forced into certain situation. We like to think of ourselves as brave, but we don’t actually know if we will run in the opposite direction in the heat of the battle. I will often think about those brave souls who are asked to deny their faith or face certain death, and what decision they will make. It doesn’t always have to be so dire, but seeing someone broke down on the side of the road, do we stop, or do we prioritize our safety or some other time restraint first.
- I mean it probably sounds absolutely crazy that we don’t know who we are to ourselves. I will try and give a short synopsis of my story as an illustration , but first , think about how many daily decisions we make just to impress others . Keep in mind that the things that I’m sharing are from another world ago, when things kind of made more sense and we knew what a woman was and was not☺️☺️. Most people fall into one of two categories and that would be the arts or the sciences. We will see people who dabble in both and have a level of success in both, but it often goes to something that is hardwired inside of us. Knowing which one of these that you fall into can determine the level of success and satisfaction that you may experience in life. When we do things that we are passionate about or hardwired to do, we are less likely to experience burn out.
- Ok, on to my illustration. I was a pretty good athlete growing up and all through high school until I experienced an injury that basically sidelined me my entire senior year. So, I kind of fell into the jock category and there were kind of unspoken rules as to what was and wasn’t expectable back then. I came close to being a band geek, but You can’t be in two places at the same time and I chose being on the field over the band room. Some of the guys that I played ball with ended up in Choir, but that was only because that is where the girls were, so it was a covert operation☺️☺️. There were hard sayings back then and one of them was that ” Men were Men”. Now you can run a lot of different ways with that, but Men use to do the hard things and gender roles were more defined. There was push back, when certain things were considered “woman’s work”. This is like certain things in the Bible, I’m just telling you how it was, not that I some how condoned it. Women were much more concerned with raising children instead of flying fighter jets☺️☺️. I never took a typing class in high school, because it was not thought to be masculine, and it’ was a short sighted decision that has occasionally haunted me over the years. I have an accounting degree that I do not use, and never really given much thought to the fact that I’m not an indoor sit behind the desk kind of guy. I have done it, but it’s not one of the things that makes my soul soar☺️☺️. I think the decision to pursue accounting was driven by money, more so than the things that drove passion in my soul and spirit. There is something to be said for making the right choices for the wrong reasons.
- Looking back, I can see where many times I have denied my giftedness, in favor of being something that I’m not. If you aren’t familiar with going against the grain, then this would be it☺️☺️. I believe that God gives us glimpses and sometimes great passions as to what paths our lives should take. I have always loved to cook. Even as a second grader I remember going to the library and checking out cook books. I still remember one of my first creations and what a disgusting mess it was as my mom trying to choke it down and tell me how delicious it was.. ..tough being a parent at times☺️☺️. I can most of the time taste something and tell you what is in it , and even probably come pretty close to reproducing it without a recipe. We look at Chefs differently now, from the way we did back then ☺️☺️. I’ve always had a keen ear for music. I choose the field over the band room and that was just another example of denying my giftedness. I’m not going to tell You that I was great with the Sax, but if I had put the time and energy into it as I did with athletics, who knows.! I still have a great love for the instrument and it still stirs my soul. There is nothing like hearing a new piece of music that you have never heard before, and being completely able to identify the artist based on things that You have heard from them before. Lastly, let’s just consider this current format. I don’t think of or consider myself to be a good writer or anything close to it, but there are those out there who disagree and have a slightly different opinion ☺️☺️. It doesn’t give me a big head , because I have read great writers and I’m so far removed from that and Secondly anything that I pen is more so a God thing , than a me thing. There is nothing like experiencing romantic love for the very first time , and when I was in high school, I wrote some of the most heart felt poetry and love letters, that you would probably never imagined came from a teenager . Again, not one of the most masculine pursuits, and by no means am I telling you that I missed out on a Pulitzer ☺️☺️. It’s something about being able to feel and experience something so deeply, and then being able to put it into words and to share it with others, and for them to have some glimmer of your experience. I guess that is mostly what song writing is about.
- I was one of those kids who could take a book report and follow all of the steps of having a rough draft and foot notes and the whole nine yards and fail miserably. If I did it at the last minute, let’s just say the night before and threw it together, it was always an A plus. Don’t ask me how or why, it just was! People will sometimes talk about performing under pressure…perhaps!
- A book report is so much more than just a telling of a story. It should be about an experience without very few exceptions. It should be a place where you enter into some semblance of what it is that You are reporting on. It’s OK, if it’s not, but it’s like you didn’t have the full experience and left something on the table☺️. Even in some scientific experiment manual, there is much to be taken away about gravity, the speed of light, or some mysterious black hole and about how it came to be. I get that we don’t all have a literary calling in life or orientation, but we all still have to give and turn in that book report.
- The Book Report is on life and what you did with the most precious gift of life. One day we will all give an account, and our ability to articulate and summarize will be somewhat important to extremely inexcusable. We all make mistakes and it’s just a part of the human experience, but were we kind in our failings in dealing with other broken people like ourselves, or did we us it as an opportunity to feel superior and to make others feel small? The question, may be , did we use our words well as into build others up, or did we make them feel small as if they should be under a rock somewhere? The one thing that absolutely none of us can survive without is grace. There is a story in the Bible about a man who was forgiven of a huge amount of money, something that he probably could never have paid, but the debt was forgiven. He shortly there after encountered someone who owed him a much smaller amount, and instead of demonstrating the same grace that had been shown to him, he demanded payment. Do we just hoard grace and act as if it’s something that we are saving for a rainy day?☺️☺️ Depending on the story that we have decided to live out, we may see things very differently as we get closer to writing the summary. We may wrestle with if we were generous or not. We may grapple with how we spent our time and if the things that we pursued in life were worth while or not? There was that one time when I hit a hole in one on the golf course. Maybe it was getting into a cage and being surrounded by great white sharks, that really got the old heart racing and the blood pumping 😚😚. No!, wait I know it was giving that speech as valedictorian at your college graduation.
- I don’t know your story or the things that moved the meter for you in your lifetime, but will they still hold that zeal of passion when you get to the end. ?We live in the age of the bucket list, and I would be straight up lying if I said that I don’t have one☺️☺️. We so often view things differently as we get older and often it’s about what the body will tolerate after a lifetime of wear and tear☺️☺️. We search for things with more genuine heart felt meaning in life opposed to the adrenaline fed, heart stopping jumping out of a perfectly good airplane ☺️☺️. It’s the times of reflecting on the birth of our children, regardless of how traumatic that experience may have been. It’s the times of our last few cherished words as we sit by a hospital bed, holding the hand of a parent, spouse or some other loved one as they slip off into eternity. The summation of the book report will often come down to did we love well. Did our lives exemplary demonstrate love and not just to our children and those closest to us in our circle.
- As in any good story, often the end will often point us back to the beginning or some highlight reel from days gone past, that was more important than it may have appeared on the surface. It may come up like a pop quiz or something that you diligently studied for, but when handed the test, your brain immediately went blank and panic quickly pursued.☺️ The bonus and the surprise for you, is that there are only two questions on the exam and they are, did you love God and did you love others? Did you love others in a way that it was evident that you know God? Did you go the extra mile in loving people when it was really hard and most definitely with the really difficult ones, because those are the one’s who need the love of God the most. I don’t think that there has ever been a more higher and difficult questions, than being to honestly answer those questions in an affirmative! At the end of days, there is no corrective action to be taken, no rewrites, no adjustments and no more second, third, or hundreds of chances to get it right. The final chapter has been poured in , and the book is turning the final page before it closes out, and there is only one thing left and that is , will you hear, ” well done my good and faithful servant or child if you prefer 😀.
- Finally seek God while there is still time before what you thought was a heavy novel like “war and peace” turns out to be a paperback with a lot of missing pages☺️☺️. Don’t deny your giftedness or the gift of being able to have a personal relationship with God
- . Till Next Time ✌️ , Peace!
- Sandy The Southerner
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