What's the rush? Editor's Letter - October 2005
I left summer kicking and screaming. I resented getting back into the routine of school: getting kids up, making lunches, rushing out the door, spending time helping at the school, CCD, Girl Scouts, and then doing it again the next day. I resent the life that causes us to be on the run. So why do we rush? Do we have to fill our mornings, afternoons and evening and even nights on the run? Do we teach our children anything by hurrying except that we must always rush?
I met a young lady this summer who spent a week on mission building homes in the Ozarks. Life was simple; they did what they needed to do to survive. Their meal times were spent together. Their children played outside with other children. People sat on the porch and chatted with their neighbors in the evenings. Their relaed style of living does not make their lives leess important than our rushed, chaotic lives.
The young people who came from our area had a hard time understanding the slow pace. Have we started keeping ourselves and our kids so busy that our lives are separated into sections instead of a whole? We have a separate time for work, time for school, time to eat, time for sports or extracurricular activies, time for church, time for religious education, time to pray, time for God. How often do we sit outside and “chat” with our neighbors without being on the run? Do we remember to pray throughout our day? We have made our lives like a big pie we continually cut into smaller pieces, until all sections of our lives are allocated only a taste of our goodness. God is not a taste of pie. God is the pie. We should have a personal relationship with Him in the whole of our lives. But how can we as a society expect to have a relationship with god, when we don’t even have a relationship with our neighbors? Our busy-ness keeps us disconnected from other people and, most importantly, from God.
This issue of the newsletter contains stories about human connection of one kind or another; human experience of reaching out and being reached for; people or groups of people who have taken time to connect with people in crisis or tragedy. They have melded back together the pieces of their pies to be with or help these people. These kinds of connection must be lived, as we live the mass and cannot be cut from a whole pie. We must use our entire pie for these connections; they make us whole and bring us together in the human experience, one with God in all our goodness.
I met a young lady this summer who spent a week on mission building homes in the Ozarks. Life was simple; they did what they needed to do to survive. Their meal times were spent together. Their children played outside with other children. People sat on the porch and chatted with their neighbors in the evenings. Their relaed style of living does not make their lives leess important than our rushed, chaotic lives.
The young people who came from our area had a hard time understanding the slow pace. Have we started keeping ourselves and our kids so busy that our lives are separated into sections instead of a whole? We have a separate time for work, time for school, time to eat, time for sports or extracurricular activies, time for church, time for religious education, time to pray, time for God. How often do we sit outside and “chat” with our neighbors without being on the run? Do we remember to pray throughout our day? We have made our lives like a big pie we continually cut into smaller pieces, until all sections of our lives are allocated only a taste of our goodness. God is not a taste of pie. God is the pie. We should have a personal relationship with Him in the whole of our lives. But how can we as a society expect to have a relationship with god, when we don’t even have a relationship with our neighbors? Our busy-ness keeps us disconnected from other people and, most importantly, from God.
This issue of the newsletter contains stories about human connection of one kind or another; human experience of reaching out and being reached for; people or groups of people who have taken time to connect with people in crisis or tragedy. They have melded back together the pieces of their pies to be with or help these people. These kinds of connection must be lived, as we live the mass and cannot be cut from a whole pie. We must use our entire pie for these connections; they make us whole and bring us together in the human experience, one with God in all our goodness.
