When-worlds-collide

God breathed life into you. Now what do you do with it?

Are you content to stay caught up in the dramas of your life, fighting to get yours and to hell with whoever gets in your way? If so, it's not surprising.

Life’s a giant stew that we’re all helping to cook. At least, it is by those who care what they eat. And right now, that stew isn’t tasting so good.

Few I talk to these days are happy with the state of affairs in our world. Standards of living are slipping with a middle class in jeopardy. Fears are being tweaked at every turn. Government is unresponsive to those in need, and seems to be more concerned with the interests of those with influence than the greater good of our nation or world. War is taking the lives of our youth, not to mention those of countless “insurgents” who fight against the will of the “imperialist infidels.”

by John Dennison

Fred Flintstone said it best. "WILMA!"

Wow. Thank God our house was built well. Because it seemed as if all hell was unleashed this past Monday. Her winds threatened to suck out our front door about midway through her fury. Luckily Shadow graciously relinquished her choke-collar so I could chain the door knobs together. The house across the street wasn't so lucky, as we discovered later.

Have you ever been through a hurricane? It’s not enough to keep one eye glued to the weather for a week, hoping against hope it will go somewhere else. It leaves you feeling really guilty, because you know if it doesn’t hit you, it’s going to hit someone else. That’s something I find very hard to do. And so beneath my breath I kept up this running dialogue with God that if it was to be our time, then so be it. Even while praying that it wasn’t.

Did you ever lose a filling, and spend all day probing the cavity with your tongue? It's almost impossible to leave it alone. That's the way I've been with what I'm seeing in our world.

And you know me. I just see things a little bit differently than everyone else.

Everywhere I look I see people going through the same old paces, caught in a rut until something comes along to shake them out of it. Like a death or serious illness. Or maybe a natural disaster that turns their life upside down, either directly or by tweaking their heartstrings with pictures of suffering plastered on the airwaves.

Hurricane Katrina cut a nasty swath through South Florida, but it was nothing compared to the devastation I'm seeing in New Orleans and southern Mississippi. What a mess!

Such stories of human tragedy seem to be coming more frequently. It wasn't so long since the tsunami rolled through coastal Southeast Asia. Not to mention the hurricanes of last year in Florida, terrible mudslides in California, wildfires in the West, and countless other events of human suffering. And that's not to mention the untold horrors we inflict upon each other.

I was thinking about all the dislocated people. People without homes. People without food or water. People without family, or at least the ability to know if they’re still alive. People without jobs to go back to, or money in the bank, or much of anything with which to rebuild their lives.

I don't know about your part of the country, but it is HOT here in Florida. And it's not just the temperature. As a New York lawyer I spoke to this morning said about his visit to Naples last week, "It's like a sauna down there!"

These must be the dog-days of August if the best I can do is talk about the weather. To boot, I can't even feel good about wanting to kick back and hit the beach. With the kids in school two weeks now, it wouldn't be right to go play while they're hard at work.

So what's this got to do with you?

God’s turning up the heat on us all. And the weather is only a small part of it. The temperature's rising, and our world's starting to boil.

Scuttlebutt says people are fed up. Sure took them long enough.

People think Starbucks is a place for coffee. Around here, it's a place local movers and shakers meet to hatch schemes to gather riches and power. And at the same time, air their views on life's problems.

It's too bad the rest of the world can't see things the same way.

Most of the time they huddle in one of two groups. Back-to-school moms were in one, exchanging celebratory laughter at finally having a moment's peace while they renewed old acquaintances. The other was an eclectic mix of high-achievers that gathers like courtesans around the throne of the Prince of Passion, who regales with opinions on everything under the sun.

Where's the volume control? This noise is deafening.

So many voices are talking at each other. And so many voices are not being heard. And so we speak louder and louder, yet achieve so little success. What are we doing wrong?

At first I thought it was just me, that maybe I was having trouble saying what was on my mind. But now, I'm not so sure. Because the whole world sounds like it's talking, but no one seems to be listening.

I know we're talking. Our lips are moving. There are even words coming out of our mouths. But somehow we don't understand each other. Or worse, we don’t care what each other is saying.

I don't know where I've been, but I must have fallen asleep somewhere back a ways. Because I just looked around and noticed all these people shouting we need to change our lives. And frankly, I didn't know things were so bad.

A great war is brewing, and there will be hell to pay if we keep going on the way we are.

There, I said it. You don't know how long I've avoided hitting that nail on the head. Not that I didn't know it was there. Just that I didn't want to sound like an alarmist, or look like the guy who walks the streets with a sign board that shouts, “Judgment Day is here!”

I've always tried to move toward a higher vision, rather than away from pain. And that's the way I practiced law and went about sharing a new foundation on which to build better lives and a better world.

But I've come to the conclusion most don't want to see those things, much less understand the meaning of life or the challenges life brings. So I guess it's time for me to speak their language.