"An Empty Jar"

This email landed in my inbox a few weeks ago:

“This January, why not start the year with an empty jar and fill it with notes about the good things that happen. Then, on New Year’s Eve, empty it and see what awesome stuff happened that year.”

My initial response was ‘What a good idea!’ However, in the weeks since then, this image stayed with me niggling away inside my head. What was bothering me?

This story from Luke: that has the rich young man who built more barns in order to store the excess crops he had harvested popped into my mind.

‘….“I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.” But God said to him, “You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?” So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich towards God.’ (Luke12:18-21)

Collecting those pieces paper with good things that happened in my life over the year, is similar in a lot of ways to the the rich young man storing up his excess wealth.

What if I put a different spin on it? What if instead of good things that happen to me, I record something else?

As 2015 begins, with the turmoil of wars and unrest, with the involvement in those wars of both the USA and Canada, with the growing disparity between the have and have-nots in the first world countries, with the plight the aboriginal population, with the racial violence on our streets, with global warming that is all but ignored by the government, etc. etc. I feel insignificant.

What in the world can I, one person, do that will effect even a small change? To paraphrase The Grinch ‘Maybe change, he thought... doesn't come from a store. Maybe change perhaps... means a little bit more!’ Maybe change will come when we all do whatever we can to help that change happen. Richard Rohr in his phrase ‘Quantum Entanglement’ addresses this issue: “There is apparently a positive inner connectedness that we can draw upon if we wish…God is the force field that allows us to create heaven through our intentions and actions.” (You can read the complete article at https://cac.org/images/mendicant/Mendicant_Winter_2014.pdf)

So perhaps, just perhaps, this means that each time I do something, however small, to address one of the many problems in our world during 2015, I am not only doing that action once but also through that action I am connecting with others, and influencing their actions. We have all heard the phrase, referencing the chaos theory, that ‘ the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil sets off a tornado in Texas’.

To go back to the jar …. Perhaps what I need to do is to write on the slips of paper those times I have done anything however large or small that addresses one of the current concerns in the world. Would I be amazed at the end of the year by the number of slips? Or dismayed at their scarcity? Do I even have the courage to find out the answer to that question?

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