Peace. Some find it under a blue sky and away from other people. Some find it in places of worship. Some seem to never find it. For me, it involves turning off the radio and just driving. Driving and pondering. Pondering and seeking understanding. Being well aware that all on this planet are mortal men and women, and yet when that mortality gets right up close and personal in our lives, most find a need for more understanding.
It’s been six months now that I’ve been separated from my wife of almost 56 years and it’s been some 41 years since the passing of my father, and only eight years since we lost Mom. The circumstances were different at each passing while still being the same.
By the time this issue of Progressive Forage is in the mail, the debacle of the Black Friday shopping madness that seems to be the official start of Christmas shopping will be past. Among the banners of the season will be displayed “Peace on Earth.” And yet the daily news has us wondering if ever peace will ever be anywhere on earth again.
Stories of man’s best attempts to be part of the “season of giving” will abound. Like the two sisters who on Christmas Eve looked out their second-story window and saw their father’s car approaching with the trunk tied down almost covering two chests of drawers. Their father was a cabinet-maker with his shop in town. The sisters were ecstatic, believing they were each getting a chest of drawers for Christmas.
In the morning, there was but one chest of drawers beside the Christmas tree for them to share. They realized that their father had made the second set for someone else. They never found out who received the second set. In fact, they were not supposed to know there had been a second set, as they were supposed to have been asleep when their father came home.
The second set of drawers went to a family their father knew would have a very meager Christmas unless he quietly and privately did something about it.
I remember numerous times that school teachers and others asked that parents of the more affluent families sort the packages under the tree so there was something more modest that was from Santa Claus and that the big-ticket goods be labeled as from the family.
Life isn’t fair. And in a roundabout way, that makes it fair because life’s unfairness to you is different from life’s unfairness to me.
Seems that Santa Claus isn’t fair either. Peace on earth? Unless you have more clout than I have, there’s not a lot that any of us individually can do there. But there’s a very good chance that there is something we can do toward peace in our homes and peace with our neighbors. Or those we happen upon that we can help.
Once a fellow insisted I take a large Christmas ornament similar to a big basket and filled with various candies and treats. It was Christmas Eve, and it was dark, and the stores would be closing in a couple of hours and town was a good half-hour away. I wasn’t done shopping.
Just as I was locking up the plant, I heard a tremendous “boom.” Someone in a heavy truck had just blown a tire. I found the truck stopped a short distance away. The driver was running empty trying to get home to his family for Christmas. He didn’t have a way to get his blown tire off the truck, and a service truck could be a two-day wait. I told him to get turned around and follow me. I used the big air gun and quickly pulled off his blown tire, got it loaded inside his van trailer, tightened the remaining lug nuts and had him back on the way home in just a few minutes. He’d have happily given me a couple of Ben Franklins for my help.
So we do what we can do. And often wonder if we are making any difference in the state of the world. And all too often what little we do is only because “it is the season.”
And of what is this “season?” To commemorate the birth of the Christ child now over two thousand years ago. That birth was a gift to mankind of a magnitude understood by only a few.
But what I have come to understand as my loved ones have left mortality is that there has been a presence in my life that was a guide and a comfort. That as I prayed over my beloved Elli in her last days of pain and upset that her suffering was eased, and that as I closed my many petitions to Heaven with an honest, “Thy will be done …” I was given an understanding that the powers of Heaven were in charge and that when I gained the experience and ability to understand that I would know and understand why things happened as they did. That assurance that completely filled me was what made my tears of goodbye tears of gratitude for having her a part of my life for so many years.
