Challenged to Express Three Blessings

A Challenge to Express Three Blessings

(And photos of places associated with friends I know on social media)

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            A friend on Facebook, who like many on-line is someone I had never met in person, was challenged to express three blessings in life and to name three other people to meet the challenge. She chose me among the three persons she challenged.  I felt extremely honored to receive her challenge. I posted my short response on Facebook and I am blogging my long response here.

            The first blessing comes from my being on social media and being in varying degrees of relationships with people from different backgrounds and perspectives. Social media is a double-edged sword. We can waste a lot of time and get embroiled in vain and worthless arguments. But for me being on social media has been a resounding blessing. I have met and come to know, at least on a certain level, so many people through Twitter and Facebook that I would never have known otherwise.

I am an introvert. I don’t easily force myself to meet new people. I generally travel in safe long-established circles of a few friends. Those small safe secure circles are the places which have taught me and also limited my perspectives of this world. One can imagine a population of people living on a remote island in a vast ocean. The residents were stranded on the island centuries before and now no one remembers that there were also people living elsewhere, far away from this island. On our little island, we imagine that we know the reality of our whole world, an island in a never-ending sea. That is how I as an introvert have faced much of life. I lived life in my circle of friends tightly wound around our remote island perspective. Social media is changing that. I am now reading perspectives of people from near Peoria to Peru (both Illinois and South America) to Palestine. I have found something in common with people whose perspectives I would have imagined so different from mine from a book editor in Seattle; as well as a thorough going intellectual with Brandeis and Cambridge educations completed, or a writer who seems so common but has graduated from Oxford, to a young vibrant African-American from New York City so wonderfully full of joy, to a Chicago based actress that has at least once helped me see a part of the horizon I hadn’t seen, and I am leaving out so many others. I have discovered a world beyond the shores of my island. I am one who loves to write and now my writing has to grow with my changing perceptions of the world. My subject matter once treated the world as a small island explained easily by the input of a few friends who knew all that was important to be known. But now I write thinking of people living in different places with differing perspectives and so I wonder how do I write to invite each and every one of them to feel as if they were meant to be part of our conversation?

Seattle skyline

 

Cambridge University offers this view

 

 

 

  

All Souls College, Oxford University

 

 

New York City at night

 

Chicago nestled up next to the Lake

 

A photo of Gaza from the sea in better days

 

            The second blessing of recent months I mentioned on Facebook was how partly because of the first blessing I have been able to deal with depression better. I’ve never been diagnosed with the disease. I tend to be someone who believes that it is best to find natural ways out of depression rather than medicated ways. But please don’t read this as if I was saying I was against medication or that I had all the answers. I am sure depression is real and if another finds a different way out of it than how I imagined myself escaping it then how can I be anything but happy for them? But if there is anything for which I can be thankful about being often depressed it is that empathy has grown in such an experience. I don’t want another to feel like life has become hopeless and that there is little to do but hope for a better mood.

That which has pulled me out of depression more often than anything else is when I have seen another struggling with something that has them in a quandary, and I realize I have been there and maybe I can help. On the internet I have found myself wanting to stand with others as they struggle with the things overwhelming them. Maybe it is a young woman who feels she was taught a strange way of coping with life learned from a purity based sub-culture. Maybe it is someone speaking almost crazy and almost as a genius revolting against the excesses of patriarchy. Perhaps it is a group of people who have suffered because of the racism I had sometimes convinced myself no longer existed. Or perhaps it is the realization that someone who has become human to me lives in a city torn by war and looking out over the rubble he feels overwhelmed. Maybe for him and or for a "her" in this situation I simply want to say “Is there any way I can help?” My moods have become less despondent because as Viktor Frankl might diagnose my situation, I have found a sense of purpose for my living.

Gaza following the war: “How can I help?”

 

            The third blessing in the midst of all this is that I have become more confident than ever before that “GOD IS LOVE.” You may well wonder how I can look up at a photograph of destruction and rubble (and all the deaths out of sight in the photo) and say without cynicism “God is love.” “Really?” Yes, really! With all the sin, pain and misery, God has come into our world with his prophets; and as a Christian I believe he has poured himself into human flesh, has walked among us, and has begun to sorrow with those who sorrow, rejoice with those who rejoice and to comfort us with assurances that He is near us even to a better day. He has begun to teach us to comfort the sorrowing, to enjoy with the rejoicing, to love our neighbors as ourselves, and to love even our enemies whom we don’t understand any more than they understand us. I believe that he who has walked with us not only now hears our prayers, sees our tears, and understands our wishes and hopes – He not only hears our prayers – He actually now embodies our prayers before the Father. More than ever I believe GOD IS LOVE.