One More Day Alive

A perfect stranger found my sunglasses the other day in the middle of a parking lot and turned them into the office of my condo complex. What are the odds of that today when we are more apt to expect someone to steal our stuff than return it? Not to mention who even has the time to do the right thing in today’s hustle and bustle world?

It made my week. You see, the week before I lost a tooth, had my hand blow up after being bitten by a wild animal, and lost a lucrative book contract. Losing my sunglasses was just one of those punctuations to a dreadful batch of events — the kind that often leads to dramatic breakdowns in bad Hollywood movies. Having them returned brought me back from the brink.

Now I know sunglasses are not the end all, be all (unless you live in Arizona) but the point is that sometimes it’s the simple things that remind us of how wonderful the world is — and how easy it is to make it even better.

Maybe we don’t have to personally stop global warming, or end all of the world’s almost countless wars. Maybe we don’t have to have the greatest job in the world, or make a world-changing discovery. Maybe we don’t have to single-handedly save the world.

Maybe we just have to do the right thing every day in our own lives, and let God work in His amazing ways in our hearts and others to do the rest.

If you watch the news or read the papers lately, you might believe it’s the end of the world. Only God knows when and how the world began and when and how it will end. That’s not for us to be concerned with.

Nor should we allow ourselves to be so stressed out with fixing all the problems in our world — the big ones and even our small ones — that we forget how to simply live our day-to-day lives the way Christ wanted us to.

He said to love our neighbor as ourselves. He wanted us to rise up every day to the challenge of rejecting those negative human emotions that are all too easy to give into: fear, hatred, selfishness, self-pity and self-indulgence.

That’s the “big job” that God asks, if not demands, from us every day. And when you do it, some pretty incredible stuff can happen. When you don’t, all the “world-changing” work in the world may not matter.

The world is a good place when we make it one with our kindness, caring and hopeful spirit, one which believes that “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

Go out today and make this a heaven on earth, at least in the way you live, and you might just help a crazy writer or a hundred other people you don’t even know not to have a nervous breakdown. Who knows all the ways that will help the world?

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