Photographer Unknown
If you’re one of the lucky ones who lives in Western
New York, or even along the northeast corridor in the US, you’ve had a winter
that started in late October and is still lingering along the doorsteps of
April. That’s nearly half a year! I know there are people who live in Antarctica
or in places that have winter all the time and even live in darkness half of
the year. And I guess the reason for
being able to cope with that kind of climate is that it’s the normal. Six months of cold and snow is not normal for
my “neck of the woods”.
I know there are some of you out there who have lived
many years and will say something like… “Well, when I was a kid…”. I’ve said that too. I remember snow up to my knees in early April
while I was all dressed up in my Easter best!
I even remember it snowing on the first day of May during an annual CROP
Walk for Hunger back in the 90’s. People
were wearing winter coats and carrying big umbrellas to keep the huge wet
flakes off their heads. Right now, in
Anchorage, Alaska it’s 46 degrees… twenty degrees warmer than here in
Rochester, NY. Heck! It’s 39 degrees in Nuuk, Greenland, and 36
degrees in Reykjavik, Iceland! All that
being said, it is 40 below zero in Antarctica at this moment and the average
temperature during the month of April is somewhere between -54 and -61 degrees.
It isn’t my intent to wax-on about the weather. No.
What I want to discern is weather…
oops, whether it’s appropriate to beg God for sunshine and flowers, or
for that matter—anything!
I think this is an important and sensitive question
for those of us who believe in God. When
I was a child just learning about God, I was taught to say my prayers at night
and ask God to watch over me and my loved ones.
In my child-thinking I knew that if God could take care of us, then
surely God would know I really wanted a bicycle. So, I expanded my asking categories. As I got older I asked for all sorts of
things, including losing weight, passing exams, finding a good running car, an
end to the war in Vietnam, and existentially, for me to be a good person and to
be able to make a difference in the lives of people. This way
of thinking changed as I got older.
I was recently asked by my spiritual counselor, “what
do you desire from God?” Such a simple
question, and yet I could not come up with a simple answer. If I had been asked the question and omitted
“God,” then perhaps I could have quickly come up with all kinds of
desires. But to infer that the wants and
desires I have should come from God left me feeling greedy and selfish. Perhaps it was the Ego taking a blow to my
sense of worthiness or just my adult reasoning that God is not responsible for
fulfilling my desires.
I sat with this conundrum for a long time. It began to
haunt me. Why would I not want to share
my desires with God? There certainly was
a big difference between asking and begging.
And of course, God already knew what I desired. The question hinged on the expectation that
God just might fulfill a desire or two.
We take for granted what people teach us as children
and when we become adults, we either don’t think about these things anymore, or
we begin to form our own ideas. Perhaps
some of us still cling to the knowledge that God will provide, but in God’s own
way, not always in the way we desire. The wider question becomes pantheistic—is
God in all things and in all aspects of life?
Someone once asked me not IF I believed, but WHY I
believed in God. The answer for me was
simple. I just feel better believing in God.
It brings me comfort. It is where
the center of my hope and serenity lies.
Deep down in my psyche I want to believe that God will reach into the
hearts of humans and one day we will all live in peace and harmony. I should not even have to ask or beg! Am I audacious?
Further thinking about God and our desires, Neil
deGrasse Tyson writes in his book, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry: “We do not simply live in this universe. The universe lives within us.” (page 203)
This expands the idea of God as Universe and living
within us which should then give us the ability to attain our own wants and
desires.
Norman Vincent Peale writes: “No matter how dark
things seem to be or actually are, raise your sights and see the possibilities…
Always see them for they are always there.”
I desire so much for the welfare of this planet and
its peoples. I have to believe that we will overcome one day. I certainly believe that in the very near
future, springtime will overcome!
