This ocean adventure called life is most easily navigated when we have a guiding light.
The winds and waves of circumstance push at all of us.
1. We can passively go with the flow.
2. We can choose the badge of the victim.
3. We can loose ourselves in pleasure.
4. We can harness the wind and waves.
The Drifter,
Spun by wind and wave,
Helpless, says, ‘Whatever…’
The Drowner
Plays for sympathy.
‘It’s been the worst week of my life.’
The Surfer
Scans the horizon,
Wanting ever ‘The next big thing.’
The Wise Men
Follow the star.
Adjust the sails.
Twist the rudder.
The Wise-ards know.
– Roy H. Williams
Start begins with star.
Rick Warren popularized the concept of a guiding light in his book, The Purpose-Driven Life, but he certainly didn’t invent it. That book was published in 2002. By 2007, it had sold 30 million copies.
It would appear that people hunger to have a purpose.
Miguel de Cervantes wrote about a man consumed with purpose.
His Don Quixote has been heroic and laughable, wise and foolish, admired and scorned for more than 400 years. Steinbeck speaks of Cervantes and Quixote in his preface to East of Eden, then says, “The reader will take from my book what he brings to it. The dull witted will get dullness and the brilliant may find things in my book I didn’t know were there.”
Steinbeck looked at Don Quixote and realized that we tend to see what is already within us.
In The New York Observer of March 31, 1910, John Bancroft Devins set 14 words apart in quotation marks but failed to attribute them. These 14 words have since been repeated many times:
“Two men looked out through prison bars.
One man saw mud, the other stars.”
The first man saw mud because mud was within him.
The other saw stars because he was full of light.
We do not see things as they are, but as we are.
We especially do that with the Bible, I think.
Jesus speaks of vision in the 6th chapter of Matthew and the 11th chapter of Luke. I suppose the passage has as many interpretations as it has readers:
“Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. The light of the body is the eye: if your vision is singular, your whole body will be full of light. But if your vision is unfocused, your body will be full of darkness. If the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness!”
I read those lines and hear Jesus speaking of the passion and energy and creativity and stamina – the light – that comes from having a vision, a dream, a purpose, a goal. And I hear him speak of the echoing emptiness of life without these things. Perhaps I find in that passage only what I bring to it, but that’s what I find, nonetheless.
I find myself contemplating this for three reasons:
1. It is November.
2. We have only to build Bilbo Baggins’ house and the Lenhard-Murray amphitheater and the Wizard Academy campus will be complete. What will we do then?
3. Pennie and I remember in vivid detail the day we purchased the land on which Wizard Academy is built. The ensuing 9 years and 8 months passed us by with such speed that we are left gasping in a vacuum.
I walk across the campus and am startled by what I see. When did all this happen?
Each autumn I give serious thought about what to do with the rest of my life. I reflect on the irreversible past and project a possible future. It is my favorite time of year.
Start begins with star.
“In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing. The worst thing you can do is nothing.”
– Theodore Roosevelt
Start begins with star.
“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
– Howard Thurman
Start begins with star.
“It’s when you’re safe at home that you wish you were having an adventure. When you’re having an adventure you wish you were safe at home.”
– Thornton Wilder
Go.
Follow your star.
Begin your adventure.
“Safe at home”
is highly overrated.
Roy H. Williams
