Not the World We Used to Know

I invented this rule for myself to be applied

to every decision I might have to make in the future.

I would sort out all the arguments

and see what belonged to fear and which to creativeness;

and other things being equal, I would make the decision which

had the larger number of creative reasons on its side.

I think it must be a rule something like this

that makes jonquils and crocuses come pushing through cold mud.

                             Katherine Butler Hathaway, English writer

                                                                              1890-1942

The song, “The Times They Are A-Changin’” written by Bob Dylan, became one of the anthems for the civil rights movement in 1960’s. Although its words are a half century old, they are as fresh today as if they just were written. Their admonition to “start swimming or you will sink like a stone” speaks to the chaotic world of this twenty-first century. Our changing world is not going to return to the way it was. Instead, we need to “start swimming” if we are to survive the upheaval that is everywhere.

Crystal-ball predictions for the future are not particularly accurate during stable times. It’s anyone’s guess what our global community will look like a year from now or five years from now. There are so many variables that Siri, the iPhone 4S’s personal assistant, can not make an intelligible response about the future — even though it is great fun to ask “her” such questions as what is the meaning of life?. IBM’s supercomputer Watson, who starred on the game show Jeopardy, is not likely to do much better! Even intelligent software cannot accurately predict the unimaginable.

However, such instability and uncertainty are not an invitation to excuse ourselves from action. One of the extraordinary qualities about our being human is the way that we raise to the occasion in times of crisis. All of us have our stories of people who have accomplished the impossible.

I remember being on a mission project in Tennessee’s Cumberland Mountains. We (adults and teenagers) were assigned to small groups of five or six. Every morning, we fanned out across small valleys, where generations ago people found a toehold to raise their families. Our assignments were to work on whatever projects local people had requested help. Tasks involved painting — inside or outside. And building outhouses, mowing, or clearing away kudzu vines running rampant over everything in their path.

As the small groups returned one evening, word spread like wildfire about what had happened at one work-site. A front porch had collapsed on one of our volunteers, pinning him to the ground. The young minister’s back had been broken and he was hospitalized in critical condition.

We learned that other members of his group did not stand around deliberating about what they should do. As if they were a single entity, they first lifted the porch off the young man. They figured out where to find a phone and how to bring the nearest medical rescue team to their very rural site. When an ambulance arrived from many miles away, the injured man was rushed to a hospital and then airlifted to a larger facility in Nashville. And the small group of people, who lifted that porch from his damaged body, reflected on how they had accomplished the impossible.

We gathered that night on a hilltop under the stars. We prayed for his healing and for his family. Phone calls had been made to home churches. Word rapidly traveled from Minnesota to across a wide swath of southeastern United States. It was my first experience with the power of prayer by thousands of people focused on one family’s ordeal.

After weeks in an ICU unit, the young man was transferred to a rehabilitation facility for intensive physical therapy. A year later, he returned to ministry. A wheelchair gave him mobility to reach out to others and return the care he received from so many people.

Feats of “inhuman strength” and stories of people rescued from sure death challenge our thinking about what is possible. Perhaps, we ask ourselves what we would have done in similar circumstances. We marvel at people’s quiet determination to not let hard things defeat them. We admire people behind the scenes who make things happen. And we are inspired by the courage of those, who grit their teeth after some calamity in their lives and vow to continue on with help from others.

The chaos of today’s world presents us with the impossible. Some people say the world has passed some kind of tipping point and believe humanity is on a non reversible, downward path. Some of reasons they quote are renewed possibilities of nuclear war, climate change, political polarization and paralysis, an increasing gap between the few who have much and the disappearing hopes of a vast majority of people for an adequate life, and acts of  terrorism ranging from car bombs to cyber-hacking.

The end they suggest is coming is not the end-times I learned about when I was growing up in a near- fundamentalist church. It is a secular end-time that does not discriminate among Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, Hindus - or those who do not identify with any religion or do not believe there is a God.

Other people believe creative energy can be generated in all this chaos. What is demanded of us is to unleash and channel our energy into the unimagined future. These people believe we need courage to act wisely in the face of unprecedented threats to humanity and to the planet that sustains us.

Fear can motivate us into taking positive action — as stage-fright does, so common among actors and musicians. Fear also can paralyze us. Or even worse, fear can drive people to look for simple solutions to protect themselves and their kind. Solutions that pit them against anyone who disagrees or is different.

Together, we can lift broken porches that have damaged our world.