THE POSTSCRIPT, Carrie Classon
There’s a reason I don’t write about current events.
The news flies at me faster than I can absorb. I cannot make sense of it all, and it feels as if I should always be doing something more, knowing more, helping more than I am.
The parable in the Bible that made the biggest impact on me as a child was the story Jesus told of how, when the master went away, he gave his servants talents to safeguard. Of course, in the literal sense, a talent was a large amount of money, but as a child, I took it to mean exactly as the parable implied — some kind of ability I might have.
I didn’t want to be that servant who stuck his talents in the ground and did nothing with them. Those talents didn’t do any good. They didn’t grow. They didn’t help anyone. I promised myself (at eight or nine years old) I wouldn’t make the mistake of that foolish servant. I’d make use of whatever I’d been given.
In the years since I was eight or nine, I’ve come to realize this is not as easy as it sounds. Every single person has more talents than they know what to do with. The trick is deciding what to do with whatever we have and using it wisely in whatever time we are given.
Every day, I see a multitude of people who seem to be doing a lot more than I do. And this morning, again, I wondered if I was doing enough to make the world more livable, more kind, more loving. This morning, I had the very strong impression that I was not.
So I went to church. It was cold and gray, and I was grumpy. But I figured those were good reasons to go to church rather than stay at home. Once I got there, I was surrounded by folks who seemed busy doing the things they felt they needed to do — using their talents to the best of their abilities. I genuinely felt lost. I wondered if I was the only one who felt so confused. We got all the way to the benediction before I felt any clarity at all.
“We will seek the good,” the benediction said.
It said a few other things, but that phrase, “seek the good,” stuck with me because, for the first time in several days, I felt as if maybe there was something I could do.
I could seek the good — in every person I encounter, in every interaction I have, within the hearts and minds of the folks I might not agree with. I can seek the good.
It doesn’t sound like a lot. It seems like a pretty simple thing, actually, not a serious job assignment. It doesn’t sound entirely sensible, and it certainly doesn’t sound pragmatic. But I’m going to seek the good because this morning, it suddenly seemed to me that making a practice of seeking the good is a lot harder than it seems. And possibly, it’s more important than it sounds.
It is so easy to lose hope. It is so easy to become deeply cynical. It’s easy to explain what is wrong with others and what is wrong with ourselves, and there are a lot of people who do that well.
But right now, when there is no shortage of anger or fear or cynicism, I’m going to try to seek the good instead — the good I know is all around me — sometimes in plain sight, sometimes in places I forget to look.
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