Are We Just Passing Through?

grave marker

How often do you stumble upon what you forgot or even didn't know you were looking for? Interesting experience isn't it? It's something like suddenly remembering what you had forgotten you were trying to remember, and of course it's always long after the time you needed to remember it.

Are you one of those people who hate to backtrack? Have you ever driven someplace you've never been before and discovered there's no road out except the one you came in on? Isn't life like that? We sometimes realize the only way out of a pit is to slowly and painfully climb up the steep incline we slid down so easily. We don't always simply pass through to the other side. Just passing through is a silly concept, like closure. Have you ever seen a grave stone inscribed with, "Just passing through?"

Too much of my life was spent blindly stumbling into holes and sometimes deliberately sliding down slopes to only find the pleasure wasn't worth the pain of climbing out. No, I don't like backtracking.

Just passing through is both true and false. It might be tritely cute and sarcastic on a gravestone and might get an occasional smile from those who pass by, but do you really think we're just passing through?

I was told the devil's in the details. Science doesn't think so. Did George Washington Carver think so? Life is in the details; every pothole we step into, every hole we fall into and every alley we lure ourselves into.

Older folks leaf through the memories of their life the way one leafs through a book. They often discover their life is not transformed by what's in the main body of the page, but by the margins, the holes, the pits, the slippery slopes and dark alleys where they should not have been, but were. There is more to darkness than what eludes the eyes. Often the only way out is the way we went in, and wouldn't you just know that exit wounds are larger than entry wounds! The peaks and lows of living are just that, living, but how we respond to our own peaks and lows and the peaks and lows of others is the essence of who we really are.

Sooner or later we are all in a hole or a pit of some kind or another. Maybe it's our fault we are there, maybe it isn't, but we are unable to get out on our own. We need someone to stop and help. We need someone to see that we are in a hole from which we cannot escape on our own. We need someone to lay down their cell phone, turn off their headphones, and take off their blinders and help. Sometimes nothing can be done to help, but wait. Should any of us have to wait alone?

If life is defined, transformed, and even redeemed by our response to what happens on the margins, why do we try and spend so much time in the middle of the page? Why do we deny the margins are there? There's more to life than just passing through. We need to stop and take notice of all the folks around us who are calling from one kind of hell or another. We might just find that the way out of our own private hell is through helping someone else out of theirs.