Friday, June 13, 2008

My Serendipity


...Wow... My day was just that. 

So I love thesaurus.com. It makes me sound so smart in my term papers. :) I was looking for a word to perfectly describe today, and I found the perfect one. 

 

Serendipitous: the faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident.

 

Let me elaborate...

So my day started about 12:30 this morning. I woke up in a sweat. Not because of a scary dream or anything, but because it was actually like 90 degrees in my house. Why? I’m glad you asked... MY ELECTRICITY WENT OUT! Ugh! And for the most ridiculous reason i've ever heard... a woodpecker... yeah... Having the electricity out is only fun when it’s on a cold night and you get to have fun with flashlights. But that was not the case today... You see last night we had fajitas for dinner. They were delicious! But this morning the whole house smelled like hot raunchy onions. So here I was annoyed and sweaty and bored. So I decided to check my facebook mail...HA!!! 

So after that I just figured that the hot outside was better than the hot oniony inside of my house and I decided to go for my morning walk. There was nothing better to do so I walked farther than I usually do this morning. I always love going into this neighborhood called Sapphire Island. No, not because it's a magical land with roads made of sapphire...ha-ha. It's has just always been a beautiful place to me. Every house or mansion I should say, has a dock that overlooks Betz Creek. The neighborhood always has the most colorful flowers on every lawn and the sides of the streets are covered with tall palm trees. But today when I walked through the neighborhood it was different or maybe it was always this way and I never really noticed it. It was really quiet. I was greeted only once with a head nod and half of a wave. As I walked farther I noticed I was alone. No one was outside. The only other greeting I received was from a whiny cat who I think had rabies or something. Maybe there was no one else outside because everyone was at work; or maybe because the power was out and everybody else's house smelled tolerable enough to stay inside. I don’t know. It just felt eerie. Every single house had beautiful homely porches with two or three rocking chairs but I never saw anybody sitting in them. I saw picnic tables and baseball toy games in the yard but nobody was out there to use them.

I remember when we were in the Dominican Republic. When we went horseback riding through the villages we had to make sure we didn’t run over people because everyone was outside. There were dozens of people sitting around the streets just talking and laughing with each other. We saw old ladies fixing soup for anyone to have as they came to visit. We saw a huge game of baseball going on. It seemed like all the guys from the village were either playing or cheering them on. These people were really living.

I think that it’s ironic that the Dominican people had next to nothing yet they were the most giving people I have ever met. Maybe we are different because we have so much. Maybe if we didn’t put so much worth into our possessions they’d be easier to give away. Maybe the reason Christ tells us to sell our stuff and give to the poor is not just for their benefit but for ours as well.

Maybe this all sounds cliché to you, but all of this has really rocked my world this week. I don’t have a deeply profound little slogan to explain my thoughts. I don’t have a three-point lesson. I don’t even think I have final point. My purpose in doing this blog is to tell other people how I am recognizing God in our world with hopes that they will be inspired to do the same. I know all of this sounds random. So maybe all I want to say in closing is that today I saw huge beautiful houses with unfriendly and closed off people living in them and in the Dominican Republic I saw run down shacks with some of the most giving, genuine, and wonderful people in the world living in them. Maybe someone can learn something from this. Comment if you did.

~Peace 

"I, therefore, a prisoner in the Lord, urge you to walk worthy of the calling you have received, with all humility and gentleness, with patience accepting one another in love, diligently keeping the unity of the spirit with the peace that binds us. There is one body and one Spirit just as you were called to one hope at your calling; one Lord, on faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all"           Ephesians 4:1-6

3 comments:

Gary Durbin said...

Sometimes serendipity to us is sovereignty to God. I don't think it's any accident that you discovered this. Keep sharing the love.

JEREMY said...

may you always see things through these eyes.

may you never miss a chance to catch a glimpse of the presence of God.

Andrew B said...

linked ;)
great stuff, keep writing. you never need 3 points to get your point across, you do a wonderful job just being you.