Life is a Gift

A couple of weeks ago I was walking through the back yard and Conor pointed out a rose breaking through our fence and pushing it's beauty into our yard! It was very cool. I took a picture of it (so you see). I was thinking about that when I was recently reading a book my friend Mike Green recommended. It's called The World I Live In and it is a collection of essays by Helen Keller. I've been reading a lot on vacation and this little book has been a real gem.

Here is a passage:

The poets have taught us how full of wonders is the night, and the night of blindness has its wonders, too. The only lightless dark is the night of ignorance and insensibility. We differ, blind and seeing, one from another, not in our senses, but in the use we make of them, in the imagination and courage with which we seek wisdom beyond our senses.
It is more difficult to teach ignorance to think than to teach an intelligent blind man to see the grandeur of Niagara. I have walked with people whose eyes are full of flight, but who see nothing in wood, sea, or sky, nothing in city streets, nothing in books. What a witless masquerade is this seeing! It were better far to sail forever in the night of blindness, with sense and feeling and mind, than to be thus content with the mere act of seeing. They have the sunset, the morning skies, the purple of distant hills, yet their soul voyages through this enchanted world with a barren stare. The calamity of the blind is immense, irreperable. But it does not take away our share of the things that count--service, friendship, humor, imagination, wisdom.

I think of that as we are in New Jersey, in Madison, New Jersey, precisely as I write these words. We are at our friends' Lynda and Evie's home. I haven't seen Lynda in 18 years -- and it is so great to see her again that I can hardly believe it. In our friendship I know the gift that life is that Keller writes about. Lynda and her daughter Evie, live just a few blocks away from where I went to seminary. Kathy and I walked the grounds of the school again tonight.

What a whirlwind of days it has been. We have walked the blistering hot streets of the nation's capitol. We walked by the WW II monument and the Lincoln Memorial and the Vietnam War Memorial. We visited the Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian. Mostly what I enjoyed was listening to the laughter of my son Jordan and his friend, Paul, in the back of the van as we traveled. Kathy and I had a good chance to talk and laugh as well. It all reminds me that which Keller writes.

We went out to Arlington Cemetary on Friday before leaving Washington. When we did that I looked at the rows and rows of tombstones and I thought about all those deaths. And I thought one final time -- "Life is a Gift."