"But instead he, like other young men, settled down in a place where he began quietly giving up his dreams."
When I started writing in my head, I was sure I was remembering "It's a Wonderful Life", but an extensive search didn't corroborate my "memory". I'm sure it's a movie as I remember hearing it, but can't apparently find the source.
Life has been good lately. At least, life hasn't been "bad". I guess that means that life has been good. My life is full of things I like and value, yet still feels empty for some reason. I recently trimmed my schedule back from 4 weeknight commitments to preserve some margin, but it was a hard choice as every commitment had been carefully chosen to begin with. I felt that I didn't have any time to hear what God might be saying to me in amongst all the things I wanted to do.
God is good and I see His hand in my days and His plan in my life, yet something just isn't quite right. I feel like I lack something, even though I can't think of any part of my life that is incomplete. I like everything in my life, yet it doesn't feel "right". Not in a "waiting for the other shoe to drop" sense, but rather in the "I hope I'm on the right path because I'm not getting guidance or correction" way. I do my best to be aware of opportunities I shouldn't miss and thorough in all I do, but whether that pans out remains to be seen.
I accept that life growth is a slow, steady process. Is my life like a pearl, with layer after layer of irritation accreting into something that might eventually be beautiful? Is my life to be like a river rock, tumbled over and over until all the rough edges are knocked off? David picked up smooth river stones to kill giants, though, so that might be all right. Fun fact - David picked up five stones, but apparently only used one to kill Goliath. Why five? If you read closely, four other giants threatened Israel during his reign. David had the wherewithal (the stones, if you will) to defeat them, but never did. Infer your own lesson here.
One reason why my life might be without "high drama" right now is as a balance to other people I include in my life. Plenty of my friends have stuff going on in their lives, good or bad. Since my life is on cruise control, I am free to just listen and support. If my life were also frustrating, I would have less emotional/spiritual energy to support and be there for them. That's a reason, but not an especially good one.
A couple weeks ago, I spent some quality time maintaining the knives I frequently use, including my kitchen knives, pocketknife, and so on. To sharpen a knife, you start with a coarse stone that removes material quickly to bring the edge roughly to shape. Then you move to progressively finer stones to remove the previously-made scratches and refine the edge towards its ideal edge. Lastly, for the ultimate edge, you polish the edge with a very fine stone, high-grit sandpaper, or polishing compound on a strop. The ultimate is a mirror-polished razor-sharp edge and takes large amounts of patience and effort.
On a cheap knife, the steel will be soft. It will be easy to put an edge on it, but it will deform too easily to be polished. During use, the edge will also be very easy to turn or dull. Quicker to sharpen, but quick to dull as well.
In contrast, good steel is hard. Many strokes of the stone are required to shape it, and it can be polished to a mirror finish (or "surgical sharp"). It'll hold an edge well, even through tough use, but sharpening it will be a long, slow affair.
My life is to be hard steel - slow to sharpen, but sturdy and resilient once sharpened. If God didn't take as much time to teach me what I am to know, it would either leave me "dull" or mean that I was easily bent and deformed from His idea. Instead, the forming process will be difficult and slow, but the end payoff will be completely worth the effort.
In Kurt Vonnegut's short story
"Harrison Bergeron", the world is completely equal. To ensure that nobody feels inferior in looks, mental capacity, or physical ability, the government has appointed a Handicapper-General that invents handicaps for all these areas, such as mandatory earpieces with distracting sounds or bags of birdshot padlocked around a person's body. The greater a person's natural gifting, the larger the handicap given until everyone is "average". George and Hazel (the protagonists) have a 14-year-old son Harrison who has been taken away by the office of the Handicapper-General for being unfair. One day, a ballet "performance" is interrupted by an announcement of Harrison's escape from custody. Due to the announcer's ineptitude, a ballerina is called upon to read...
"Ladies and Gentlemen," said the ballerina, reading the bulletin. She must have been extraordinarily beautiful, because the mask she wore was hideous. And it was easy to see that she was the strongest and most graceful of all the dancers, for her handicap bags were as big as those worn by two-hundred-pound men.
And she had to apologize at once for her voice, which was a very unfair voice for a woman to use. Her voice was a warm, luminous, timeless melody. "Excuse me-" she said, and she began again, making her voice absolutely uncompetitive.
"Harrison Bergeron, age fourteen," she said in a grackle squawk, "has just escaped from jail, where he was held on suspicion of plotting to overthrow the government. He is a genius and an athlete, is under-handicapped, and should be regarded as extremely dangerous."
Harrison's dramatic entrance, in turn, interrupts this announcement.
[Harrison] was exactly seven feet tall. The rest of Harrison's appearance was Halloween and hardware. Nobody had ever born heavier handicaps. He had outgrown hindrances faster than the H-G men could think them up. Instead of a little ear radio for a mental handicap, he wore a tremendous pair of earphones, and spectacles with thick wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides.
Scrap metal was hung all over him. Ordinarily, there was a certain symmetry, a military neatness to the handicaps issued to strong people, but Harrison looked like a walking junkyard. In the race of life, Harrison carried three hundred pounds.
And to offset his good looks, the H-G men required that he wear at all times a red rubber ball for a nose, keep his eyebrows shaved off, and cover his even white teeth with black caps at snaggle-tooth random.
Pretty handicapped, you could say. Pretty well weighed down by life. Finally, he seems to have had enough.
Clanking, clownish, and huge, Harrison stood - in the center of the studio. The knob of the uprooted studio door was still in his hand. Ballerinas, technicians, musicians, and announcers cowered on their knees before him, expecting to die.
"I am the Emperor!" cried Harrison. "Do you hear? I am the Emperor! Everybody must do what I say at once!" He stamped his foot and the studio shook.
"Even as I stand here" he bellowed, "crippled, hobbled, sickened - I am a greater ruler than any man who ever lived! Now watch me become what I can become!"
Harrison tore the straps of his handicap harness like wet tissue paper, tore straps guaranteed to support five thousand pounds.
Harrison's scrap-iron handicaps crashed to the floor.
Harrison thrust his thumbs under the bar of the padlock that secured his head harness. The bar snapped like celery. Harrison smashed his headphones and spectacles against the wall.
He flung away his rubber-ball nose, revealed a man that would have awed Thor, the god of thunder.
"I shall now select my Empress!" he said, looking down on the cowering people. "Let the first woman who dares rise to her feet claim her mate and her throne!"
A moment passed, and then a ballerina arose, swaying like a willow.
Harrison plucked the mental handicap from her ear, snapped off her physical handicaps with marvelous delicacy. Last of all he removed her mask.
She was blindingly beautiful.
"Now-" said Harrison, taking her hand, "shall we show the people the meaning of the word dance? Music!" he commanded.
[...]
Harrison and his Empress merely listened to the music for a while-listened gravely, as though synchronizing their heartbeats with it.
They shifted their weights to their toes.
Harrison placed his big hands on the girls tiny waist, letting her sense the weightlessness that would soon be hers.
And then, in an explosion of joy and grace, into the air they sprang!
Not only were the laws of the land abandoned, but the law of gravity and the laws of motion as well.
They reeled, whirled, swiveled, flounced, capered, gamboled, and spun.
They leaped like deer on the moon.
The studio ceiling was thirty feet high, but each leap brought the dancers nearer to it.
It became their obvious intention to kiss the ceiling. They kissed it.
And then, neutraling gravity with love and pure will, they remained suspended in air inches below the ceiling, and they kissed each other for a long, long time.
Watch me become what I can become! Such is the cry of a man knowing that his potential has been stifled and his time has come. When I first read this story, I wondered if Harrison was made into the man he became partly by the burden of his handicaps. Granted, he was born with substantial gifting, but through hardship, I like to think that he refined his personality and goals.
Applied to my life, being made to wait and learn the hard and slow way implies that God is using the hindrances (the "handicaps") to form me into something that is strong and amazing and will last.
I guess that thought is a slight comfort. Nevertheless, I believe that God is who He says He is and that He'll do everything He's promised to do. And that is enough.
Labels: fiction, life
