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.
Anyone with two eyes
And a heart
Can see
That some souls
Are in crucial need of help.
But it takes two eyes
And a heart
And some experience at it
To see that all souls
Are in crucial need of helping.
“I used to think that people can change,” he told me, “but now I’m pretty sure that people can’t change.”
“So, you’ve changed, then?” I asked, with my eyebrows raised.
“Yep,” he said, not realizing the discovery.
What if someone actually knew
What you are going through?
And what if they understood
And cared
And shared your pain
And were personally invested
In your well-being?
I suppose there are many things
The soul needs to thrive.
And whether I have discovered yet
The half of them, I could not say.
But I have got this one thing, at least,
Figured out pretty well.
And I want you to listen.
No one among us has got
All our puzzle pieces in place,
Such that we are complete people
And lacking in nothing.
There is simply not time for it all.
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