What brought this on was my wife, Dina, declaring (after I said something is eating the pansies) that we should get rid of them and buy some new plants for the porch this Spring. These by the way are the brave six pansies that survived the winter as described earlier. So I was a little sad as I consigned them to the Yard Waste Bin – some of them looked sad too out of the bin, but tried to smile. But all is not lost, dear pansies, you will not be sent to eternal damnation. Instead, according to the Book of Recycle, you will be converted to a lovely compost and eventually live life again, probably as another beautiful flower (that sounds a little Hindu – Baptist version: they will become even more beautiful (not bug-eaten) pansies in the gardens of someone’s “Mansion in the Sky”).
Anyway we will change the flowers.
Which brings me to Change. We often don’t like it – especially us old folks, who are between the 70 and 80 that Psalms say we will last. Partly because it is harder to learn new things when we get old and partly (mostly?) because we are relatively soon going to go through that Big Change, when, in my theology anyway, we go from a material to a Spiritual existence.
It does no good to resist change because the Universe is set up for it. I was listening to Obama and then Rev. Wright speak about change. The changes they want are along the lines that help society as a whole and that is what in general is happening in the world. When greed gets in the way it begins to look like we are all headed for the wrong kind of changes and then the Jeremiahs raise their voices and sound the warning (the same old warning that God is not happy with the rich unfairly oppressing the poor), and a lot of people don’t like to hear it as always. But the change will happen anyway if God wants it that way.
So I try not to resist change (being a life-long researcher made it easier – research always results in change) and I dutifully dumped out the pansies and washed the pots (hoping that redoing the flowers will keep her too busy for some other more expensive changes she suggested) – I do NOT want to either change wives or change houses. RIP, Pansies!
But I really would like to see a change in our government policies. Not to consign the present folks to eternal damnation either, but recycle their talents in a new and more constructive direction. The way I see it, change is not an end – it is a new beginning.