We will always have Paris
In the oft quoted lines from The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot said:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
One of the sweetest gifts God has bestowed on us is the ability to savor sweet places and events in our past – in a way, we time travel. The Psalmist said “May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you, if I do not consider Jerusalem my highest joy.
We hum the tunes we danced to as teens, follow bfs on Facebook, keep sweaters we haven’t been able to fit in for years, and make pilgrimages to the sites of restaurants and theatres that closed years ago. I still have the size 2T tennis shoes my daughter, who would become a track star, wore in kindergarten.
The themes of much of my nostalgic reverie revolve around relationships. That is probably true of most of us. Some people are especially skilled at connecting others in their sphere of influence. People they know have needs with people they know have resources. Dan Ryan, Steve Franklin, Chris Patton, and Alan Jobe are among the most skilled I know at verbally putting people together through contacts and referrals. Others like Steve Bentz, silently create a fabric of community through instruction and mentoring – they know each other through whom they were taught. All connectors.
Hidden within the choreography of these connections are chance meetings, like atoms colliding in a centrifuge–encounter, power, over! I once was standing in line at a prestigious coffee shop in downtown Atlanta. I was third; the first was a woman who appeared to be in her twenties. She wore tattered clothes but was otherwise neat. Holding a handful of coins, the woman timidly ordered a glass of milk but was told that they didn’t sell milk. She was hungry.
The barista told her they served a flavored steamed milk and seeing she was of meager means, added that the drink costs $3.75. Long silence. Now, not only was she hungry, she was embarrassed.
Everyone in line was staring at the floor in the awkwardness of the moment. I saw falling from the hand of the man number two in-line, a crumpled up $10.00 bill. As it hit the floor, he said to the woman: “excuse me, did you drop that?” As if grasping at a life line, she picked up the bill, turned to the barista and said, “I’ll have the steamed milk with hazelnut flavor. And, a blueberry scone.”
I exchanged not one word with anyone and stunned by the drama, left without ordering anything. A chance meeting but it changed my views on giving forever.
We should always be alert for a serendipitous chance to impact, grace, or love another in the centrifuge of life. You never know – the one impacted, graced, or loved might be ourselves.
“It was about noon when a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?”
Kent
View Comments