Jack Pelham

She giggles,
Despite her best intentions
Toward diligence,
And uncertain as to
Why she’s giggling at all—
It being counterproductive,
Of course,
To the task at hand.

It’s amazing
Just what a blessing or curse
One person may be to another.

When does anybody really give his all?

And for that matter,
Does anyone even know how?

Some choose to love, thinking love the greatest of all the virtues, and citing the example of none other than Jesus himself in support of their choice. And yes, Jesus was the master of love! But he was also the master thinker, and master of the scriptures. He was master at teaching and correcting and rebuking and training and understanding and explaining and counseling and leading and sacrificing.

Not many are likely to agree, but how we choose to see this world is exceedingly important. Whether we are willing to see things as they are, or whether we choose to twist them in our minds so as to see them as we wish they were—this is one of the most fundamental questions about what kind of people we choose to be.

The ability of humans to imagine things different from how they are is an amazing gift, but the regular pretending that they are different from how they are is a nasty and widespread habit, and may be among the most hurtful things we do to ourselves.

Set the one guy’s life in this ugly-beautiful world,
And he’ll decide to hate the ugliness and love the beauty.

And the next guy will love some of each
And hate some of each—
The ugliness and the beauty, that is—

And a third guy will even surprise you by loving
Lots of the ugliness
And hating lots of the beauty.

There’s good reason to believe
That Heaven knows every little thing
We go through down here,
And that the import of it all
Is not lost on them.

And it may be easy simply to
Say it isn’t so,
Since it’s not like angels
Are popping in to meet our every need,
Nor even to answer our every question
Or help us out of every bind.

What if, at the ends of our lives,
We should discover that
We might have understood God better
Had we tried harder—
But that we had been lazy about it,
And had misunderstood him in several ways?

Would we also discover that this had
Caused any harm along the way?

A person can wait for quite some time
If he is waiting for his emotions
To approve of some new improvement
In his life habits—
If he is waiting for them to cheer him on,
Grinning ear to ear with amazement at him,
Applauding his decision to change,
And gushing over him with hugs and kisses.

To be sure, many foolish things
Are worthy of ridicule.

But the wiser I get—
If that is indeed what is happening—
The harder it is to defend the ridiculing.