LIFE WAS MEANT TO GLOW
By R.J. Godlewski
©August 16, 2008, All Rights Reserved
As I sped down the dirt road on matters of errand towards my sister’s house with fireflies ricocheting off my windshield like tracer rounds delivered from an Air Force C-130 Spectre aircraft, I found my car neatly dissecting two extremes of society. Towards my left, just a few tens of feet towards the West laid several nondescript homes nestled along a riverbank. The only thing that they shared, besides their apparent age, were the swarms of mosquitoes that descended like vultures upon those unlucky enough not to be immune or running for cover inside. Not more than fifty yards towards my right – the East – rose the magnificence of a major luxury development. Besides opulence, serenity, and a secluded egress route, these homes shared a large manmade lake whose waters are periodically dyed blue to heighten the beauty of the houses that possess more square footage than I possess an imagination. The residents that waved towards me as I looked out through my driver’s side window earned, from what I know of their livelihoods, between $20,000 and $100,000 per year while those that appeared through my passenger window, very much oblivious to my passing, earned enough to afford and furnish homes worth between $3,000,000 and $10,000,000+. I marveled at the two neighboring subdivisions, both within vocal – if not economic – hailing distance of one another.
The large, rising, just-turning full moon which itself was enveloped within a few strands of reddish-orange clouds that I witnessed on the return drive from my sister’s added a picturesque backdrop to the large European-style homes that existed by the dozens towards the East. While I was immersed within the beauty apparent from an artist’s eye, I knew full well that others, who shared my distance from that particular kind of wealth, would have envisioned the lunar spectacle not as romanticism but as a hoped for nuclear attack upon the privileged. The thoughts that I carried home from my brief journey had very little to do with the wealth that I always long for but never quite hope to achieve. On the contrary, they had everything to do with life itself.
Those of us who do notice the striking contrast between the run-of-the-mill homes along the river and the palatial houses nestled around the lake often forfeit the equality of both. The lesser-valued homes sat upon the serpentine banks of a natural river; a creation provided by God Himself for those who enjoyed fishing along its edge and the children who sometimes revel within its cold, flowing waters. The larger, newer homes developed by European arrivals sat upon what was once an old gravel pit and if my memory serves correctly, that old literal hole in the ground was an eyesore that outlived its usefulness to man. What exists there today is something that man, taking what talents God bestowed upon him and what land God provided, turned into majesty of art. This is what led me to consider the gift of life and not the privilege of wealth as I tore down the bumpy road.
Too many of us are quick to judge; quick to distance ourselves from the absolute joy that is expected out of life. When we look upon magnificent homes, for example, we leap to one of two thought processes. Either we ridicule those that live within them or we find some way of condemning their livelihood. We say such memorable things as “I know those kinds of people; they cannot afford to buy any furniture because their house is so large” or “That’s ridiculous; those people don’t have any backyards!” My own personal reaction is often not much different: “With all of that money, they still choose to have neighbors?” ;o) What all of us fail to consider, is the infinite value that each one of us represents irrespective of how much money we have in the bank or whether the local police respond to our home first whenever a burglary takes place. People just accept prejudices based upon appearance.
Case in point; Sara and I lived within a trailer complex down in Arkansas – the very home in which she passed away. From the outside, I could not help but think that we had unwittingly moved into a concentration camp. Nine battleship gray trailers were lined up symmetrically with a tenth being a larger and newer, three bedroom specimen. Inside, Sara had transformed our metallic shoebox into a true home as only a good ol’ Southern Virginia woman could have. The care and effort that she placed into turning it into home then teases me regularly today with thoughts of whether she had somehow known that it would become her final living place on earth. I do not know, but I did whatever I could to turn the outside into something worthy of her presence.
When I worked for General Electric (After I had returned from a brief stint in Maine working aboard a fish processing vessel), I decided to really spiff up the place. I added garden lights around our deck, a rhododendron that eventually exploded with the brilliance of its red flowers, several bright green ferns and, my ultimate favorite, a towering Japanese Yew (which, much to my eccentric delight, is supposed to be extremely fatal if consumed. he he he). Compared to the other nine trailers, every single one occupied by groups of students ranging in size from three to five persons, our humble trailer was the Taj Mahal. One day, while Sara and I were safely home watching television, the bakery where she worked (located only a few hundred feet away) was robbed by an armed assailant. The police combed the area and one of their officers entered our trailer complex to ensure that the creep didn’t try to break into one of the units (which are usually vacant during the summers).
The officer didn’t stop at the entrance by the mailboxes. He didn’t proceed until he was near the footpath leading in from the bakery in the distance. No, he parked right in front of our door and ensured that Sara and I were well-protected. The officer noticed our well-decorated home and my brand-new jet-black Chevy Impala with all the extras parked in the driveway and decided we were the ones that deserved protection. Call it what you want, but I believe that officer figured that as we had enough dignity to transform our shoebox into something befitting a human being then we were worthy enough to have police presence during a crime. I only wish they were around when the kids in “Number Ten” were celebrating the end of the semester by firing .22 bullets and 12 gauge pellets off of our roof, but I digress… ;o)
Life is thus not about who or what we are. It’s about what we do with what we’ve been given by God. It is about what had been discussed within the Parable of the Talents (Mt 25:14-30) – that if we simply bury our own ‘talents’ into the ground without any effort to increase our ‘wealth’ then we will incur the wrath of God. And quite deservedly so. Many of us simply fear trying to elevate ourselves into something valuable to society. We attend college to ‘par-tay’ ignoring the infinite value of an education. Perhaps we simply show up for work everyday, do only our assigned task, and then sue the living hell out of the employer when they decide to close up shop or move production overseas. Had we only bettered ourselves, then perhaps our company would have thought twice about going under.
Our culture is possessed by a very strange breed. We criticize the devaluation of the dollar, the American worker, even our personal liberties. Yet, it is the devaluation of human life itself that beckons our nation to disaster. It began in 1973 with the legalization of abortions and it continues today with the devaluation of the family. By denying the most innocent amongst us of the very gifts that we have been given by our parents and our nation, we simply elevate our own lives above that of all others. We demand, for example, police protection when our homes are violated but equally demand that we can abort an innocent child whose only ‘crime’ is that they are an unwanted ‘byproduct’ of our personal indiscretions. Or, if we somehow allow our children to be born, we do not offer them enough to build their own lives into something of value. Like the houses along the riverbank, we keep gazing across the road at other families and state such things as “those foreigners have better kids because they are taking all of our money” or “their kids succeed in school only because they are privileged.”
No kids have life easy; just getting born nowadays is to be considered a major achievement. Yet, we allow our children to be born within a world that does everything humanly (literally) possible to taint their ambitions and their goals, making it decidedly difficult for them to mature into responsible and functional adults. We set them forth with prejudices that “life is hard” or that “those people are different from us” or quite possibly “the stupid [government, rich, Republicans, Democrats…add your favorite gripe here!] makes it hard for a simple man to earn a living.” Perhaps merely being “simple” is our own damn fault.
We expect too much out of everyone but ourselves. A baseball player gets a $158 Million contract and we cry foul because they don’t hit a home run during every at-bat. Brett Farve decides that he really didn’t want to retire but gets emotional when he’s traded away from his bellowed Packers. During the Gulf War of 1991 I personally witnessed many national guardsmen and reservists who said such things as “the only reason that I joined the military was to pay for college” – nearly the identical line that a co-worker once lamented to me: “the only reason that I graduated high school was so that I wouldn’t have to work as a dishwasher!” In my case, I merely walked over to where Sara had been preparing the restaurant’s salads and whispered “I don’t have the heart to tell him that I went to college.”
Whether we are an ex-Astrophysics major who had to work as a dishwasher to pay bills or, at the present, a forty-five-year-old returning to school to earn credentials in fields far less palatable to the general public, life was meant to be lived and just as we were born kicking and screaming for a chance to grow, we must transform our lives into something truly noticeable. Each one of us has been given a unique set of talents, interests, and experiences. We are quite literally a one-in-a-six-and-a-half-billion chance of existence. No one – repeat, no one – has any better or worst chance because we are singularly different. There are far too many shoes to fill for even our most powerful supercomputers to formulate some reasonable stereotype that can be accentuated with the simple pressing of an ‘enter’ button.
Just like the full moon rising up over my dusty drive, what life heralds depends largely upon our particular vantage point. Each one of us could turn out to be either an artistic representation of creation or a foreboding call to disaster. Whichever we choose, it all rests upon the level of effort that we place into transforming our lives. If we desire to remain with that which someone else provides us, then we are simply valued according to that person’s whims. However, should we accept God’s game plan – that the human spirit is supposed to glow with the fire of life – then there are no boundaries sufficient to corral our energies. The greater the struggle; the greater the rewards. Life is indeed a bitch, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. What about you?
The large, rising, just-turning full moon which itself was enveloped within a few strands of reddish-orange clouds that I witnessed on the return drive from my sister’s added a picturesque backdrop to the large European-style homes that existed by the dozens towards the East. While I was immersed within the beauty apparent from an artist’s eye, I knew full well that others, who shared my distance from that particular kind of wealth, would have envisioned the lunar spectacle not as romanticism but as a hoped for nuclear attack upon the privileged. The thoughts that I carried home from my brief journey had very little to do with the wealth that I always long for but never quite hope to achieve. On the contrary, they had everything to do with life itself.
Those of us who do notice the striking contrast between the run-of-the-mill homes along the river and the palatial houses nestled around the lake often forfeit the equality of both. The lesser-valued homes sat upon the serpentine banks of a natural river; a creation provided by God Himself for those who enjoyed fishing along its edge and the children who sometimes revel within its cold, flowing waters. The larger, newer homes developed by European arrivals sat upon what was once an old gravel pit and if my memory serves correctly, that old literal hole in the ground was an eyesore that outlived its usefulness to man. What exists there today is something that man, taking what talents God bestowed upon him and what land God provided, turned into majesty of art. This is what led me to consider the gift of life and not the privilege of wealth as I tore down the bumpy road.
Too many of us are quick to judge; quick to distance ourselves from the absolute joy that is expected out of life. When we look upon magnificent homes, for example, we leap to one of two thought processes. Either we ridicule those that live within them or we find some way of condemning their livelihood. We say such memorable things as “I know those kinds of people; they cannot afford to buy any furniture because their house is so large” or “That’s ridiculous; those people don’t have any backyards!” My own personal reaction is often not much different: “With all of that money, they still choose to have neighbors?” ;o) What all of us fail to consider, is the infinite value that each one of us represents irrespective of how much money we have in the bank or whether the local police respond to our home first whenever a burglary takes place. People just accept prejudices based upon appearance.
Case in point; Sara and I lived within a trailer complex down in Arkansas – the very home in which she passed away. From the outside, I could not help but think that we had unwittingly moved into a concentration camp. Nine battleship gray trailers were lined up symmetrically with a tenth being a larger and newer, three bedroom specimen. Inside, Sara had transformed our metallic shoebox into a true home as only a good ol’ Southern Virginia woman could have. The care and effort that she placed into turning it into home then teases me regularly today with thoughts of whether she had somehow known that it would become her final living place on earth. I do not know, but I did whatever I could to turn the outside into something worthy of her presence.
When I worked for General Electric (After I had returned from a brief stint in Maine working aboard a fish processing vessel), I decided to really spiff up the place. I added garden lights around our deck, a rhododendron that eventually exploded with the brilliance of its red flowers, several bright green ferns and, my ultimate favorite, a towering Japanese Yew (which, much to my eccentric delight, is supposed to be extremely fatal if consumed. he he he). Compared to the other nine trailers, every single one occupied by groups of students ranging in size from three to five persons, our humble trailer was the Taj Mahal. One day, while Sara and I were safely home watching television, the bakery where she worked (located only a few hundred feet away) was robbed by an armed assailant. The police combed the area and one of their officers entered our trailer complex to ensure that the creep didn’t try to break into one of the units (which are usually vacant during the summers).
The officer didn’t stop at the entrance by the mailboxes. He didn’t proceed until he was near the footpath leading in from the bakery in the distance. No, he parked right in front of our door and ensured that Sara and I were well-protected. The officer noticed our well-decorated home and my brand-new jet-black Chevy Impala with all the extras parked in the driveway and decided we were the ones that deserved protection. Call it what you want, but I believe that officer figured that as we had enough dignity to transform our shoebox into something befitting a human being then we were worthy enough to have police presence during a crime. I only wish they were around when the kids in “Number Ten” were celebrating the end of the semester by firing .22 bullets and 12 gauge pellets off of our roof, but I digress… ;o)
Life is thus not about who or what we are. It’s about what we do with what we’ve been given by God. It is about what had been discussed within the Parable of the Talents (Mt 25:14-30) – that if we simply bury our own ‘talents’ into the ground without any effort to increase our ‘wealth’ then we will incur the wrath of God. And quite deservedly so. Many of us simply fear trying to elevate ourselves into something valuable to society. We attend college to ‘par-tay’ ignoring the infinite value of an education. Perhaps we simply show up for work everyday, do only our assigned task, and then sue the living hell out of the employer when they decide to close up shop or move production overseas. Had we only bettered ourselves, then perhaps our company would have thought twice about going under.
Our culture is possessed by a very strange breed. We criticize the devaluation of the dollar, the American worker, even our personal liberties. Yet, it is the devaluation of human life itself that beckons our nation to disaster. It began in 1973 with the legalization of abortions and it continues today with the devaluation of the family. By denying the most innocent amongst us of the very gifts that we have been given by our parents and our nation, we simply elevate our own lives above that of all others. We demand, for example, police protection when our homes are violated but equally demand that we can abort an innocent child whose only ‘crime’ is that they are an unwanted ‘byproduct’ of our personal indiscretions. Or, if we somehow allow our children to be born, we do not offer them enough to build their own lives into something of value. Like the houses along the riverbank, we keep gazing across the road at other families and state such things as “those foreigners have better kids because they are taking all of our money” or “their kids succeed in school only because they are privileged.”
No kids have life easy; just getting born nowadays is to be considered a major achievement. Yet, we allow our children to be born within a world that does everything humanly (literally) possible to taint their ambitions and their goals, making it decidedly difficult for them to mature into responsible and functional adults. We set them forth with prejudices that “life is hard” or that “those people are different from us” or quite possibly “the stupid [government, rich, Republicans, Democrats…add your favorite gripe here!] makes it hard for a simple man to earn a living.” Perhaps merely being “simple” is our own damn fault.
We expect too much out of everyone but ourselves. A baseball player gets a $158 Million contract and we cry foul because they don’t hit a home run during every at-bat. Brett Farve decides that he really didn’t want to retire but gets emotional when he’s traded away from his bellowed Packers. During the Gulf War of 1991 I personally witnessed many national guardsmen and reservists who said such things as “the only reason that I joined the military was to pay for college” – nearly the identical line that a co-worker once lamented to me: “the only reason that I graduated high school was so that I wouldn’t have to work as a dishwasher!” In my case, I merely walked over to where Sara had been preparing the restaurant’s salads and whispered “I don’t have the heart to tell him that I went to college.”
Whether we are an ex-Astrophysics major who had to work as a dishwasher to pay bills or, at the present, a forty-five-year-old returning to school to earn credentials in fields far less palatable to the general public, life was meant to be lived and just as we were born kicking and screaming for a chance to grow, we must transform our lives into something truly noticeable. Each one of us has been given a unique set of talents, interests, and experiences. We are quite literally a one-in-a-six-and-a-half-billion chance of existence. No one – repeat, no one – has any better or worst chance because we are singularly different. There are far too many shoes to fill for even our most powerful supercomputers to formulate some reasonable stereotype that can be accentuated with the simple pressing of an ‘enter’ button.
Just like the full moon rising up over my dusty drive, what life heralds depends largely upon our particular vantage point. Each one of us could turn out to be either an artistic representation of creation or a foreboding call to disaster. Whichever we choose, it all rests upon the level of effort that we place into transforming our lives. If we desire to remain with that which someone else provides us, then we are simply valued according to that person’s whims. However, should we accept God’s game plan – that the human spirit is supposed to glow with the fire of life – then there are no boundaries sufficient to corral our energies. The greater the struggle; the greater the rewards. Life is indeed a bitch, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. What about you?
Trackposted to Full Metal Cynic, Rosemary's Thoughts, A Blog For All, Shadowscope, Cao's Blog, Democrat=Socialist, Nuke's, Diary of the Mad Pigeon, Political Byline, third world county, Woman Honor Thyself, McCain Blogs, The World According to Carl, Pirate's Cove, The Pink Flamingo, and Dumb Ox Daily News, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.
Hi Debbie! Long time, eh? He writes so wonderfully. If I only had a little more time, I would have the whole thing. What I did read, he is still the poetic writer he has shown himself to be. Great! Have a great day.
Posted by: Rosemary | August 18, 2008 at 06:20 PM
Totally agree Katie, though sometimes I don't always do I'm afraid!
Posted by: EDGE | August 17, 2008 at 08:43 PM
The mentality that young people have today is not a result of abortion, or the deterioration of the family, but the result of 40 years of liberal education and thinking by our so-called leaders.
Why should anyone actually work for something? It should just be handed to them. When men who play a children's game make more than the doctor who treats your family, something is wrong there.
What you did to that trailer was turn it into a home. Home is not a million dollar house. Home is a the place where you love and live in. It is the place where your children are raised in. It is a place filled with love.
Most people strive for the mansion down the block. They should strive for the love within their selves.
Posted by: Katie | August 17, 2008 at 04:11 PM