Terry Hershey

"Tell me the weight of a snowflake," a coal-mouse (a small bird) asked a wild dove.

"Nothing more than nothing," was the answer.

"In that case, I must tell you a marvelous story," the coal-mouse said.

"I sat on a branch of a fir, close to its trunk, when it began to snow-not heavily, not in a raging blizard-no, just like in a dream, without a wind, without any violence. Since I did not have anything better to do, I counted the snowflakes settling on the twigs and needles of my branch. Their number was exactly 3,741,952. When the 3,741,953rd dropped onto the branch, nothing more than nothing, as you say, the branch broke off."

Have said that, the coal-mouse flew away.

It takes just one snowflake to make a difference.

Just one.

Every once in a while we are all pestered by the question, "Does what I do, or give, or offer, make any difference? Does it mean anything?" Sometimes it doesn't take much to make me wonder. Or feel inadequate.

Have you ever asked yourself the same question?

I spent the week writing in Palm Springs. (A Doctor recommended I go there to soak up the sun, you know, for my emotional health. Actually, he wasn't really a Doctor, just a friend that looked a lot like a Doctor, but that was close enough for me. So I took his advice.) I wrote. I read. I slept. I soaked up the sun. I played a little golf. I watched the sun, rise and set. I listened to the moon.

While in Palm Springs I was asked, by an employee at the hotel, "What do you do?"
"I'm a writer."
"What kind of books?"
"Motivation and inspiration."
"What do you motivate your readers to do?"
"Mostly, to do nothing."
"Wow. You should talk to my husband. He's an expert at that."

So. Do I make a difference?

This question messes with me only when I assume that something is missing from my life. Or that I need to prove something to someone. And it doesn't help that we live in a culture that assumes "enough is never enough." So I respond to the question with an even more frenzied lifestyle.

In the airport returning home to Seattle today (where there is snow and ice and everything anti-Palm Springs), this question about making a difference still dogged me, so I perused the books in an airport bookshop. One offered inner peace, another balance, another wealth, another a renewed sense of urgency, and yet another some comprehension about life's most pressing questions. The variety made it awfully difficult to choose, so I settled for a bag of Ghirardelli's dark chocolate. That seemed to help.

In the Gospel of Luke, a 12 or 13 year old girl was given an extraordinary assignment. Her response, "I am the Lord's servant. May it be to me as you have said."

In essence, Mary said to the angel, "I am willing to be just a snowflake."

I am willing to do what I can, with what I have been given, with a full, grateful and willing heart. And I am willing to not worry about the outcome. Or what people think or say, or how it will be measured in the court of public opinion. To literally, let it be.

Why am I afraid to let this be enough?

Saturday morning I sit on my outdoor patio in Palm Springs, pre-dawn, wrapped in a blanket (it is still chilly in the high desert), and the moon is full. And appears to me, to be larger than I have ever seen it. (I read later in the day that because of the orbit, the moon is literally closer to the earth than it has been in hundreds or thousands of years, so it doesn't just look larger, it really is.)

In the cold cobalt-blue pre-dawn cloudless sky, the moonlight radiates. For whatever reason (something I failed to understand in science class) the atmosphere around the moon forms a perfect circle, a globe, a vapor-like ball of gauze. I see only the crown of the San Jacinto Mountain range, with its uneven and jagged, but clearly demarcated crest, as if it is a graph-line descending from west to east. Just above the south-western ridge sits the full moon.

I am speechless.
The scene is exquisite.
It is perfection.

Which takes me back to snowflakes.
The moon, is just being the moon.
And it reminds me of a comment from the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. "For Christ plays in ten thousand places, lovely in eyes and limbs not his."
So it's not about me becoming something I am not.

It is about reflecting what is already there.
Inside.
Its about snowflakes, and making a difference by just being who you are.

Camas Lilies
Consider the lilies of the field,
the blue banks of camas opening
into acres of sky along the road.
Would the longing to lie down
and be washed by that beauty
abate if you knew their usefulness,
how the natives ground their bulbs
for flour, how the settlers' hogs
uprooted them, grunting in gleeful
oblivion as the flowers fell?
And you--what of your rushed and
useful life? Imagine setting it all down--
papers, plans, appointments, everything--
leaving only a note: "Gone to the fields
to be lovely. Be back when I'm through
with blooming."
Even now, unneeded and uneaten, the
camas lilies gaze out above the grass
from their tender blue eyes.
Even in sleep your life will shine.
Make no mistake.
Of course
your work will always matter.
Yet Solomon in all his glory
was not arrayed like one of these.
Lynn Ungar

Dear God,
Prayer cannot bring water to parched land, nor mend a broken bridge, nor rebuild a ruined city, but prayer can water an arid soul, mend a broken heart and rebuild a weakened will. In this spirit, let us pray:
For health and healing,
for labor and rest,
for the ever-renewed beauty of earth and sky,
for thoughts of truth and justice which stir us from our ease and move us to acts of goodness,
and for the contemplation of life which fills us with hope that what is good and lovely cannot perish.
Amen.
The New Union Prayer Book

Peace,
Terry Hershey

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