The Only Bet That Always Pays Off

Bet (verb) 1. To make a wager with; (synonyms: gamble, stake, risk, hazard, venture, chance.)                     --Random House Dictionary

            I’m not a betting man, at least not here in Massachusetts, which in just a few years will roll the dice as one of the newest states to gamble on legalized casinos.  With visions of a bountiful jackpot for the state budget, the governor and legislature are going all in and betting that Bay Staters will morph into Bet Staters.  Not me—I don’t like the odds. The house always win.  No bets for me.

            Yet I confess I do gamble. It’s not on cards or craps or the horses. No: my gambling happens in the stock market, which in many ways is the biggest collective bet of all.  The stock market, stock markets actually, all around the world: New York, London, Tokyo, Moscow, Beijing, etc.  According to the website seekingalpha.com, the total market value of all these stocks is $48 trillion, give or take a few trillion, on any given day.  That’s $48,000,000,000,000: lots of zeros in that number.  

            24/7, all year round, some place, some where, traders buy and sell stocks in hundreds of thousands of businesses. They “bet” on behalf of institutional and individual customers, like you and I, that a stock will rise or fall in the hope is that their gamble will pay big money. 

            We all gamble on Wall Street. If you’ve got a 401K or a traditional pension you are a part of the bets placed everyday.  If you’ve got a savings account at the local bank or an equity account at Fidelity or the like, you are playing the odds.  If you own a house with a mortgage some institution somewhere which holds that paper may be reselling that debt to someone else and seeking to turn a buck in the process. 

            When markets go up it is all good.  The economy hums.  Stockholders and financial companies make money.  Capitol is available for new business ventures, new equipment and new hires.  And we little investors get to go along for the ride and celebrate as our nest egg increases.  But when the markets tank, when the ticker plummets, when a bet is wrong and billions are lost, then we remember it is all finally a gamble. A bet.

            Just ask Jamie Dimon or Mark Zuckeberg, two CEOs who in the past weeks learned how unpredictable markets are, impossible to call a sure bet.  Dimon is CEO of JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank by deposits in the United States.  His firm lost $2 billion dollars in risky derivative bets made out of the bank’s London office this month.  CNNMoney reports the actual loss may be closer to $6 billion. Dimon has publically and profusely apologized for the loss, let go the errant trader, and reassured anyone who would listen that the bank has, “a fortress balance sheet” and has learned its lesson.  At the same time JPMorgan Chase’s stock price dropped by up to 20 percent, meaning a loss for its shareholders of another $30 billion in value. Talk about a bad bet.    

            Then there’s Zuckeberg, founder of Facebook, the social media giant that last week rolled out the third largest initial public offering of stock ever.  The good news? At $37 per share, Facebook raised more than $16 billion which made Zuckeberg and several other investors millionaires and even billionaires. The bad news?  The stock, which was supposed to soar upwards according to “conventional wisdom” instead sunk by as much as 19 percent in the days after the IPO.  Rolled the dice but all that came up was snake eyes.

            When it comes to the gamble of the markets, all bets are off. For a bet is just that, a bet. It would not be a bet unless there was a real chance of losing.  This rule applies in a backroom poker game and on the trading floor, in fact in all of life. There are finally few things which qualify as a sure thing or money in the bank. Not that we humans don’t try to find our ace in the hole.

            We bet that wealth will make us happy and find out money cannot buy contentedness. It’s not for sale at any price. We seek the comfort of possessions and discover these things are but a fool’s gold, and eventually rust and fall apart.  We double down on substances that numb us for awhile but in the morning leave us empty.  We wager that busyness is the ticket to fulfillment and learn that a full calendar does not equal a full heart.

             It’s natural to seek a sure bet, but perhaps we’re looking for a spiritual payoff in all the wrong places. Think: if you had to go “all in”, bet the house, your life on just one thing, on a power, a truth, a reality, who or what might that be?  For folks of faith the answer is simple and two fold: God and love. God, the Higher Power, the Universe, the Force, which holds it all together.  Love, the one human bet that always wins, always makes the world a better place, always makes this life worth it and filled with purpose, and always comes back to us, doubled, even tripled in value. 

            So these days the markets may be undependable and fickle. The dice of life are thrown and fall randomly.  But there’s one bet that beats the house consistently.  As Albert Einstein said, “God doesn't play dice with the world." 

            That’s how I’m betting. How about you?

           

Bill Russell versus Kim Kardashian? No Contest.

Hero (noun) 1. A [person] of distinguished courage or ability, admired for brave deeds and noble qualities.

Celebrity (noun) 1. a famous or well-known person; fame; renown.

            --Random House Dictionary

            A new statue will grace Boston’s City Hall Plaza in 2013, one of Bill Russell, perhaps the greatest Celtic player and greatest professional basketball player of all time.  His career stats are unprecedented.  He played on eleven NBA championship teams in thirteen years, including eight in a row from 1959-66.  First player with fifty rebounds in a game.  Played on two NCAA championships teams and one gold medal Olympic team. Inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1975.  First African-American NBA head coach. Five time Most Valuable Player, 12 times an All Star. 

            You’d assume Russell’s statue would capture the man decked out in Celtic green, his body stretching impossibly high up to block a shot, all muscle, height and power.  Show the star that was Russell, right? The celebrity, the athlete extraordinaire? But instead the proposed design for the statue is anything but star struck.

            Instead picture a circular plaza framed by three benches, a Celtic shamrock outlined among the red bricks.  One bench features career stats and a quote from Russell: “There is no such thing as someone else’s child.”  In the center is Russell, dressed in civilian clothes, his hand on the shoulder of a youth, perhaps listening to them or teaching, certainly caring.  On another bench sits a second youth, alone, waiting for someone else to care about them too, a coach, teacher, minister or peer.

            Makes sense to portray Russell thus, because while he was a great player on the court, someone for fans to cheer, whose star power sold so many tickets, more important, he was a hero off the parquet.  A hero: someone who used his fame to further causes so much greater than himself or any mere game.  He fought against racism which in the 1950’s and ‘60’s in Boston and America was very nasty.  He marched for civil rights with The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. when to do so garnered few accolades.  He spoke out as an African-American leader and once declared of his work as a trailblazing coach: “What's more important than who's going to be the first black manager is who's going to be the first black sports editor of the New York Times.”  In 2011 President Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in America.

            Now in the last years of his life he’s committed, through The Bill Russell Mentoring Grant Program, to make sure kids in Boston have adult mentors in their lives, so young people of all races can become the truly great men and women they were created by God to be.  Hence the statue: not portraying sassy slam dunks or self-righteous pumping fists or hot dogging high fives, which passes for the NBA “stars” of today.  No to this NBA legend, his life is now about community service and the girls and boys who need adult kindness and direction to blossom.

            Our world could use more heroes like Russell, and fewer “stars”, and not just on the field of play but in the rest of our culture too.  America has become a star obsessed land. We’ve been “American Idolized” and are transfixed by our celebrities, these self-promoting, narcissistic, preening prim Donnas who vie incessantly for our attention.  The top ten folks followed on Twitter? Almost all lightweight celebs, more famous for scandal and frothy music than any kind of heroic lives: Justin Bieber, Kim Kardashian, Britney Spears, Shakira. Each boasts more than fourteen million followers. 

            The largest selling weekly magazine in the United States? People.  The TV landscape is littered with shows all vying to out celeb and out weird each other: “Real Housewives”, “Wife Swappers”, “Celebrity Rehab”—you get the picture. Even the Presidential election feels creepily star-crossed as substantive issues take a back seat to splashy attack ads and spin and image.

            I think I get why some folks love the whole celebrity vibe.  There’s nothing at stake in loving to watch celebrities crash and burn so publically. Nations will not topple nor do worlds stop turning when Justin Bieber tweets he once had a beer or Britney talks about her latest stint in rehab.  It’s all in “fun” I guess, right?  It’s distracting. It makes for good copy, great video.  It allows escape from our own not so famous or infamous lives.  It’s entertainment.

            But me, I’ll take a real life flesh and blood hero like Bill Russell any day. He wasn’t perfect.  He had a very conflicted relationship with the fans and media while he played here.  But he was and is something no celebrity will ever be: human and real.  Not a puffed up press release but a person. Not an icon but a neighbor. Passionate about both his play on the court and his life as a citizen, Russell is one “star” working to make Boston a better place to live.

            Russell reminds us we can and must do better for one another, in as simple an act as mentoring a child. Now if only America might take all the energy and dollars and attention we slavishly devote to “stars” and instead put some of that star power towards honoring heroes who seek the common good.                

            For there are celebrities and then there are heroes. I’ll follow a hero every time.

                                                  

God and the Girl Scouts

Against (preposition) 1. in opposition to; contrary to; in resistance to; hostile to

            --Random House Dictionary

Decisions, decisions…to buy the thin mints or go for the peanut butter patties, or maybe just indulge and go for several boxes of both? I’m a pushover when it comes to buying Girl Scout cookies from the earnest young girls who knock on my front door or corner me at church with their order forms once a year.  Who could be against cookies or one of the oldest youth service organizations in America, the Girl Scouts, who this year celebrate their 100^th anniversary?  One hundred years of carrying out a noble and simple mission: “Girl Scouting builds girls of courage, confidence, and character, who make the world a better place.” 

Found in all 50 states, the Girl Scouts of America (GSA) welcomes girls of all races, religions and backgrounds and boasts 2.3 million girl members and 890,000 adult members.  Most well known for those darn tasty cookies, their work is actually much more substantial: to teach girls leadership skills in the hope of helping them grow into better citizens, better neighbors, and better family members, all in service to others.        

Who could be against them? Well, the largest Christian church in America, that’s who, at least a handful of its national leaders.  According to a recent Associated Press story, that church’s bishops have launched an official inquiry into the Scouts' "possible problematic relationships with other organizations and various problematic program materials.” According to The Huffington Post, the concern is that “...the Scouts associate with other groups espousing stances that conflict with church teaching.”  Huh?

Now I’m not going to try and parse what is seemingly so “offensive” about the Girl Scouts in the view of my fellow folks of faith. People of faith in the United States come in all shapes and sizes.  Like Girl Scout Cookies, faith in God in the United States boasts a flavor for every theological and social taste, from ultra conservative to uber liberal.  America is still one of the most religious nations on earth.  That’s good, at least most of the time.

But as a person of faith I just want the wider culture to know faith isn’t always about just being against something, counter, critical, castigating, as in this critique of the Girl Scouts.  Or gay marriage. Or any number of hot button issues churning in the culture wars that so wrack our public discourse these days.  Name an issue, any issue and guaranteed, some one will drag out God and faith and then declare how this same God is against, against, against, against. 

Newsflash.  Some people of faith are actually for some things, in favor of things, lots of good things actually, many noble and true and great ideas and ideals. Like love, peace, compassion, mercy, hope, generosity and community.  Like watching out for the powerless: the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the stranger. Or fully supporting wonderful groups like the Girl Scouts.

You’d never know this by watching the news, reading the newspaper, surfing the web or perusing a Facebook page. Media and social media often seem to only embrace and showcase the “against” God folks.  In fact the press seems incapable of portraying faith in God as anything but cartoonish, freakish, forever handing the microphone to the most radical and mean spirited, even crazy, of so called “religious” folk.  Like the Florida “pastor” who burned the Koran in public. Or a North Carolina “pastor” who advocated from the pulpit beating “gayness” out of kids.  Yes he actually said that, and then his hateful and stupid words went viral and were all the rage on the Internet just weeks ago. 

But not all who follow God are so against. Jesus was once asked to name the most important law in all of scripture, one moral declaration which sums up what it means to have faith in God. Tough question considering that the holy texts he followed contained some 613 commandments, many of them prohibitions, “againsts”.  His answer was simple and elegant: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  Love God. Love neighbor. Love self. 

This beautiful ethical notion can be found in every major world religion, and here’s the kicker. It is not negative, but positive.  It seeks to build up not tear down.  It doesn’t say “NO!” but instead declares “YES!” Maybe this is what it finally might mean both to have faith in God and to do faith with God.

So here’s my enthusiastic faith based shout out to the Girl Scouts! Good job! Keep it up for another hundred years. I’m all for the great things you do and how you make our world such a much better place.  Thank you.

Pass the cookies please.

   

As The Campaign Begins: Let's Get Real

Authentic (adjective) 1. not false or copied; genuine; real      --Random House Dictionary

"It's the real thing."   --slogan for Coca-Cola

I feel sorry for Mitt Romney, Barack Obama too. In the next six months these two men will compete for the Presidency of the United States, perhaps the most powerful job in the world.  With the push of a button a President can start a nuclear war.  With the right speech he can rally a country.  With the stroke of a pen as she signs a law she can change millions of lives. A great President can lead the secular salvation of a nation. Think FDR or Lincoln.  But in 2012 there is one thing both candidates for Commander in Chief seem powerless, or unwilling, or both, to do. 

That is to be real. Be really real. Be themselves. Go off script. Be true to whom, at their core, they finally are and embody what they believe in and what they truly hold dear. Tell the truth. Be the truth. Be authentic.

That’s why Romney gets my sympathy. Candidate Romney often comes across as uncomfortable in his own skin, awkward, even desperate to please whatever group of voters he stands before. Romney can appear tentative, grasping to figure out just who he is supposed to be at any given moment.  Then the press (liberal and conservative) pounds him for being “stiff”. Then his political machine counters that hey, he really, really is a great guy, really, down to earth, real. America just has to get to know him. Romney can’t seem to win this fight. 

As noted in a recent Salt Lake Tribune article by Peggy Fletcher Stack: “The Mitt Romney…on the campaign trail is often depicted as wealthy, wooden and out of touch…gaffe-prone, detached, distant.…But Philip Barlow, a counselor and friend to Romney, when he was a Mormon leader in Massachusetts in the 1980’s and early 90’s, counters: ‘Asking [Romney] to appear more informal is ironically asking him to become less authentic so that he can appear as more authentic.  We ought to allow him to be who he is and make our judgment on that basis.’”

Allow a candidate to be who he or she is and then make a judgment on that basis alone: there’s an idea! To vote for an authentic man or woman: no gloss, no façade, no smoke and mirrors. To expect our leaders to be real.

Remember the “beer summit” early on in Obama’s Presidency?  This is what it looks like when politicians are forced or choose to be inauthentic, fake, false.  An African-American Harvard professor is arrested by a white Cambridge police officer. Obama honestly weighs in. The media explodes and so these three men then have to gather on the back lawn of the White House in shirt sleeves to drink beer together and make nice, all for the cameras.  Awkward.  So clearly an act.  That day I felt pretty bad for the President.    

What might it look like if voters and the media empowered our Presidential candidates to be authentic?  What might happen if we worried less about whether or not a candidate is the kind of person “we’d like to drink a beer with” and demanded instead a candidate who could just do the job and do it well? A President not as image or press release but a flesh and blood person, neither super heroic nor a political anti-Christ, just human.   

Liberals might then give the President a break and allow him to be the political moderate he finally is. Conservatives might give Romney a break and allow him to be the political pragmatist he finally is.

Romney critics might finally accept that Romney is a very wealthy, highly successful businessman, a squeaky clean straight arrow family guy and a committed Mormon. Wearing jeans and rolling up his button down shirts won’t change him.  Obama critics might stop beating up on the President for lacking “fire” and accept that Obama is professorial at heart, thoughtful and smart and more committed to crafting attainable solutions than partisan people pleasing or smarmy glad handing.  Drinking a beer in the backyard won’t change him.

Then maybe these two real people could run a full bore honest debate through to next November about the future of the United States and who is best qualified to lead us. We’d all get to vote for an authentic person to be our next President. No artifice. No media spin. No political machinations or myth-making.   

One of the best gifts my faith gives me is the call by my Creator to be authentic, to be real, to be both the good and the flawed human being I am.  Or as Hamlet said in William Shakespeare’s play of the same name, “This above all: To thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.”    

I know this hope for presidential candidate authenticity is radically counter to our multi-billion dollar presidential campaigns with spin doctors and image creators scrambling to present their candidate as “real”, and a press talking so much more about appearances and style than real issues.  The voters who hope to drink a beer with the President don’t help much either.  Could we go any lower in our presidential expectations?

The huge problems our nation and world face call not for actors on a stage, but leaders in the real world. So President Obama and Governor Romney, here is my unsolicited advice to you both as the campaign begins: to thine own self be true.

            

When It Comes to Life, Are you Asleep or Awake?

“Let me respectfully remind you, life and death, are of supreme importance.  Time swiftly passes by and opportunity is lost.  Each of us should strive to awaken. Awaken! Take heed. Do not squander your life.” --The Evening Gatha, Zen Buddhism

What will it take to wake you up? 

To oversleep and then miss an important engagement or appointment is one of my biggest fears.  I’ve got a big sermon to preach in the morning or an extra early flight or a pre-sunrise commitment.  Then I just can’t risk snoozing through.  Some folks are blessed with an internal alarm clock which wakes them up, no worries. They somehow program a wake up time into their subconscious before sleep and then miraculously they wake right up on time. 

Not me. I sleep like the dead, like a rock, like a dead rock. I need a wake up call, a clanging bell, an annoying buzzer, an aural kick in the pants to get me up and out the door.  To just wake me up.  This often means setting not one but two alarm clocks—one next to the bed and the other on the farthest side of the room—whenever I really need to wake up.  Otherwise? Well, I might just sleep through.

To wake right up or to snooze away, and not just in bed but in life too.  Sometimes we all need a spiritual wake up call. These are the sharply realized moments, the starkly clear seconds, the haunting “A Ha!” revelations when life slows down, suddenly clarifies for us what really matters.  Whom we love.  What is finally important.  What we cherish.  How life is such a fragile and tender gift from our Creator. 

And so the doctor gives us the news and our spirits soar or sink.  The phone rings at 3 a.m. and we dread answering it.  We watch through tear-filled eyes our child on his wedding day and our hearts burst with gratitude. We narrowly escape a car accident and as our ticker thumps away, we thank God we are o.k.  We sit in church and mourn a loved one and weep at all the things the departed will now never, ever get to do.  We hold our newborn for the first time and she awakens in us the amazing mystery of existence.

We wake up. 

Or we just continue to spiritually sleep, oversleep even, ZZZZZ away as life passes us by in all its wonder and beauty.  Then we imagine it is our work that really matters the most and so we lose time with loved ones for that oh so crucial deal or that cell phone call we just have to answer. We live for the drama of life, get mired in the petty, the meaningless, the fleeting, the trivial, the need to always be right.  We waste time immersed in technology, texting away, surfing along in a virtual world while the real world unfolds right before us and we fail to see it.  We mistake wealth and money for meaning, hold on to our treasure and stuff so tightly that we convince ourselves we can really take it all with us and cram it into the coffin. We sleepwalk through life.  And then we get a wake up call.

Or we wake up, no call necessary.  Wake up and decide to take this one day, freely and generously been given to us by God, and not waste one second.  Wake up to the folks in life who need our love, right now.  Wake up to the needs of others, next door and far away, and then do something to help. Wake up to hot coffee and sultry spring mornings and birds singing and hugs from the kids and see all these little miracles as precious.  Wake up to passion and purpose and faith.  The choice is finally ours.  To stay in bed or to get up.

What will it take to wake you up?

           

                                      

When Is Enough, Enough?

Enough (adjective) 1.adequate for the want or need; sufficient for the purpose or to satisfy desire                            --American Heritage Dictionary

How much money is enough?  What is the appropriate, the right, the equitable pay for just one person? All depends on whom you ask, I guess.

One day last week may have marked a very small turning point in the societal debate about just how much America’s CEOs and business titans are worth, what they “deserve” to be paid in exchange for the services they render to their companies and shareholders.  As reported by the Huffington Post: “At Citigroup's annual meeting on Tuesday [April 17^th], about 55 percent of shareholders participating in an advisory vote rejected [CEO] Pandit's pay package. That marked the first time that investors had rejected a compensation plan at a major U.S. bank. “  

Citigroup is America’s third biggest bank by assets, and its shareholders (and those of other public companies) recently won the right to have “a say on pay”, under a provision of the 2010 Dodd-Frank federal law passed by Congress and signed by the President in direct response to the economic meltdown.  Citigroup was right in the middle of that mess and had to be rescued from insolvency by Uncle Sam to the tune of $356 billion in bailout funds and loan guarantees. 

Citigroup’s Board of Directors had recommended a pay package of $15 million to CEO Vikram Pandit, a seeming return to the pre-meltdown days of sky high executive pay for the elites. But now his salary has been called out, questioned.  One Citigroup director called the rejection “a serious matter” that the board plans to take up.  That board will no doubt research what the “market” is for bank CEO pay then calculate the most they can pay him without risking shareholders’ wrath.  Pandit won’t be poor anytime soon. But one question I doubt they’ll ask is for me the most important one of all, one which is never posed, not in “polite” company.  Not on MSNBC or The Fox Business Channel, not in the pages of The Wall Street Journal either. 

When is enough, enough?  How much money is one person really worth in our world?

By my calculation if Pandit like most Americans works fifty weeks a year with two weeks for vacation, that comes out to 2,000 hours of labor, so by his proposed pay package, he takes home $7,500 an hour, or $125 a minute.  Pandit's pay is above average in comparison to his peers.  According to the AFL-CIO, in 2011 the average pay for American CEOs in the Standard and Poor's Stock Index was up 14 percent from 2010, to $12.9 million, 380 times more than the average worker.  The real whopper of a pay package these days is that recently awarded to Apple CEO Tim Cook: $378 million in salary and stock grants.  Can one person actually hope to spend all that cash in a lifetime?  Is it possible?

When is enough really, finally, enough? 

Yes I know that “the market” will argue these folks and other select few in our world are in fact “worth” that much, at least from a bare knuckled Darwinian economic perspective. If you can get it take it, right?  Others will call any questioning of such outsized wealth accumulation “class warfare”.     

But for me—as a person of faith, I just pray that this one question will continue to be asked in boardrooms and shareholder meetings and in the media and on the factory floor and in the public square.  Spoken out loud: simply, clearly, seriously and consistently. 

When is enough, enough?  Not just economically but also morally and ethically? What is right and fair and good when it comes to the worth of all American workers and not just the ones at the very top of the food chain?  What is best for the many and not only the few? 

In that vote by Citigroup’s shareholders, maybe, just maybe, some one finally said, “Enough is enough.”      

    

Living With The Questions...

Why (adverb) 1. For what? For what reason, cause, or purpose? –American Heritage Dictionary
 
There was awfully destructive weather in the Plain states last weekend.  More than 100 tornadoes flew through parts of Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska and Iowa.  Hundreds of thousands huddled in fear. Hundreds of millions of dollars in property damage occurred.  Scores were injured and at least five folks lost their lives. I’ve never lived in “Tornado Alley”, the ominous nickname given to the heart of the United States known for violent weather.  In New England we do have our share of weather challenges: northeasters that churn off the coast, blizzards that can paralyze the region and shut us down cold, and even the rare hurricane that makes land fall and sweeps so much away.

But there’s something about a tornado which shakes me right down to my core, just scares the heck out of me.  There are the high winds which can clock in at more than 150 miles per hour. Or the speed with which these storms develop and then tear apart the land: one can boil up and set down in just minutes.  The closest I ever came to a twister was on one scary March evening in southern Florida. The winds howled and the rains blew as a group of us Habitat for Humanity volunteers hunkered down in a flimsy cabin, hoping and praying that a tornado wouldn’t find us. It was one of the longest nights of my life, made all the more frightening by the reality a twister’s path is finally a mystery.  No one with any surety can pinpoint just where or when or how it will strike.

Unlike slower moving storms which can be tracked, allowing forecasters to warn folks with time to spare, a tornado is that most arbitrary of natural events. One moment we are on the couch watching TV with the kids, the next we’re hunkered down in the bathtub, covered by a mattress, waiting.  It reminds us that for all humans think we know about how the universe works, we finally do not.  For all us mortals suppose we can control life and people and events and maybe even the weather, or learn about anything with just a click of a mouse or a tap on a smartphone, there are times in life when life is finally unpredictable, unfathomable, unknowable.

We can’t know why. We don’t know why.  Sometimes it is tempting to think we may have the answer and even attribute “randomness” to God, or to some divine plan or a heavenly will or fate. Take the remarks of Kansas Governor Sam Brownback who spoke on the Sunday after the tornadoes hit his state.  “There was quite a bit of damage,” Brownback noted, “but God was merciful.”

Considering the Governor was in the midst of a crisis, I understand his need to make such a theological declaration. It is the most natural of human impulses to want to make sense of chaos by seeking some meaning in the random.  To want to see a pattern in the enigmatic, to realize some larger life blueprint, when something comes out of nowhere and rocks our world.  To know why. I get that impulse.

But what if humans instead faced into life trying to accept just one truth? Sometimes we do not know why life unfolds as it does, both in the awful storms and the awe filled moments. Can any of us finally fully parse tender love or awesome beauty or human cruelty or random tragedy?  Asking “Why?” in the face of mystery is not the problem. That’s the most human of responses. Sometimes the most faith filled folks are not the ones with the quick answers but instead are the folks who ask and then humbly admit they do not have an explanation.

On the best of days life ends with a period, a conclusion, and a clear outcome.  “I get it!” we declare. Thank God for those times.  Yet sometimes the day ends with a “Why?”, question marks and the story is still a mystery, no ending in sight.

We can live with the answers. Can we live with the questions too?