grown elephant. While filming the lions chewing on the downed elephant’s back and legs, the Jouberts can be heard rooting for the elephant, “Come on, get up! Get up!” As she watched the elephant accept her fate, Beverly softly whispered this interpretation: “Death begins in the eyes. We’ve seen this so many times with animals when they give up hope.”1
Then a mighty miracle occurred. Suddenly the elephant began to swing her body, rocking back and forth. The downed elephant summoned from her depths a mighty surge of strength, enough to explode to her feet, shake off every one of the lions, and charge into the darkness. She said with her body and her whole being: “Enough! I don’t have to take this anymore!”
My friend’s new master story is really a universal play with four acts:
I. We get brought low.
II. Feeling alone and devoid of hope, we grovel and feel sorry for ourselves.
III. After a time, some voice from somewhere whispers: “Enough! Get off your pity-pot!”
IV. We stand up, dust ourselves off, lift our chins, set our jaws, face forward, and march on.
Happy New Year. Hope on!
January 2
A thirteen-year-old girl, at her church’s candlelight Christmas Eve service, rose and gave this testimonial:
Darkness. Have you ever been in the dark? Did you feel like you would never get out? Have you even gotten out? I’ve been in the dark. I didn’t like it. If you’ve ever been in the dark, you feel cold, alone, and disconnected from the world. That’s how I felt when I was taken away from my birth father. When my birth mom died, my birth dad and I did a lot together. I wanted to be his little shadow. Most of the time when my father was out, you saw me with him. He was the only parent I had left. When I was taken away, I was heartbroken. I now had lost my father and, to make it worse, I went from foster home to foster home. After the second or third foster home, I didn’t share my feelings. I still struggle even to this day. I didn’t let anyone in my heart. I was tired of being hurt. When the parents I have now took me in, I just thought it was some other couple who would keep me for a little while and then pass me on. But that wasn’t the case at all. They put a hand out to me and told me to hold on to it. I grabbed it, and slowly they pulled me out of the dark. They made me a family member. I had a family, and I held onto them. I’m still holding that hand of light today. Neither side is letting go. I found my light.
Oliver Wendell Holmes said that almost all the truth-telling in the world is done by children. I think he spoke truth.
January 3
Most of us have some sound ideas on how we should improve our lives. What we may lack is the courage to take that first step and then the will to follow through.
Money is a great motivator. Heart follows treasure, as in: “Your heart will always be where your treasure is.”2 Really want to give up fried food for your coronary arteries’ sake? Promise $25 to family, friends, and work associates if they see you eating any fried food in the next six months. Put the deal in writing, duplicate it, hand it out, post it on your refrigerator, or drop circulars from an airplane.
Many years ago I became aware that I was addicted to caffeine. I raised my right hand and promised my family, my work associates, and my church that if anyone saw me so much as take one sip of coffee over the next six months, I would give that person a $50 bill. I did not slip.
Want to quit saying disparaging things about yourself? Get your family to help you itemize the put-downs that unconsciously pass your lips, such as: “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong for me” or “Just my luck.” Then the deal is to drop $5 in a jar, all proceeds going for a good cause like Habitat for Humanity every time your family catches you downing yourself.
I know one recently-bereaved wife who hated identifying herself as a widow. Her grief counselor advised her never to use the word again but to say instead: “My husband died two years ago.” The counselor made her (half in jest) promise to give him $10 every time she slipped and used the dreaded “w” word.
Really want to change? Words are too easy. Few things motivate like putting money where your mouth is.
January 4
Ten years after snow-skiing 750 miles to reach the South Pole and one year after becoming the first woman to row solo across the Atlantic Ocean, Tori Murden McClure met Thor Heyerdahl. Heyerdahl had in 1947 crossed the Pacific Ocean, sailing from South America to the Polynesian Islands on a raft made of balsa logs, proving that South Americans had the materials and the ability to reach Polynesia hundreds of years before Columbus sailed to America. Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific by Raft became a bestseller in 1950. In 1951 the documentary film of the voyage won an Academy Award.
One day after the two explorers met, eighty-six-year-old Thor asked Tori if she had plans to write a book. After she admitted that she had thought about it, he whispered to her: “Be sure to leave room enough to grow.”3 She knew that he meant something like: “Do not ever let yourself get so totally defined by your past, however great or heroic or inconsequential your life has been.”
The day we believe there are no new worlds to conquer is the day something precious in our core begins to wither and die. Lucy once lectured Charlie Brown: “You know, life is like an ocean liner. Some people take their deck chair and put it on the stern, to see where they have been, and some put their deck chair on the bow, to see where they are going. Charlie Brown, tell me, where do you want to put your deck chair?”
Charlie Brown sheepishly confessed, “I can’t get my deck chair unfolded.”
Some of us, like Charlie Brown, have a deck chair still folded. We can make this year annus mirabilis, a year of wonders, a year for exploring new worlds of personal growth.
January 5
Being aware of all good future possibilities is impossible, as impossible as looking at a single apple seed and divining how many apples will come from it. A first grader can count the seeds in an apple, but no genius can count the apples in a seed.
On Saturday, December 18, Louisville meteorologists predicted a heavy snow on the following Wednesday. They described how the storm would begin forming in Texas on Sunday and reach Louisville three days later—on Wednesday morning, at rush hour to be precise.
I saw the satellite view of Texas that Saturday. It showed not one cloud. I laughed and said to my wife: “Give me a break! Forecasting snow even one day in advance in the Ohio valley is tricky. Do they really expect us to believe they can predict a giant snow five days off, before one cloud has formed?”
On Wednesday morning we had a record nine-inch snow. This layman, looking at charts and satellite and radar images with his untrained eye, was unable to see a single sign that a big snow was coming.
We are all a little like that. We have a giant blind spot when it comes to future possibilities, just as my untrained eye was unable to read the meteorological evidence for a giant snow.
What is hope? Hope is the mental and spiritual decision always to keep the door cracked a little, to stay at least a little open to a good possibility even though at the time we may not be able to see it.
Victorian poet Christina Rossetti’s prayer says it well: “Lord, grant me eyes to see within the seed a tree, within the glowing egg a bird, within the shroud a butterfly.”
January 6
I attended a lecture on Islam by Imam Yahya Hendi, Muslim chaplain at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. In his opening remarks he told how often people, when they first see him and hear his accent, inquire: “Where are you from?” He answers: “I am from dust. I am a dustian.” Such is his creative attempt to find common ground, to emphasize commonality, to begin with what unites us instead of what divides us, drawing on the words from Genesis: “You were made out of soil, and you will once again turn into