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Musings
Fully Present
Rev. Peter Faass | 9/16/2010
I was walking by the Lomand School ball fields here in Shaker Heights recently. It was a lovely late afternoon and after a full day of busyness I was enjoying the exercise and the fresh air. Actually after my knee surgery this summer I was just enjoying walking for some length of time at all!
I noticed a man was doing laps around one of the fields. As he passed by the children's playground a boy of about six or seven, yelled out, "Daddy can you stop and play with me?" The man replied, "I can't stop my pace. I need to finish." As his father whizzed on by the look of disappointment on the young boy's face was palpable.
I could wax eloquent about parents who all too often place their own needs above those of their children. But that would be to miss the greater point. This father's inability to slow down and put his own needs aside momentarily so that he could be fully present to his son is indicative of a terrible malaise that infects us as a society. We all are running too fast. We are all tying to meet selfish goals of one sort or another. Because of this we fail to be fully present to our children, our families, our friends, our faith communities and to God. And ironically in all this self-absorption with doing the things we think are important, we fail to be truly present to our authentic selves. What ends up happening as we run toward these goals we perceive as being important is that we pass on by the things that are of true value in life; we miss living life to its fullest.
At the end of the day is your life going to have value because you ran a nine minute mile, or because you enjoyed playing ball with your son on a warm, sunny afternoon? Where are you running so fast toward your selfish goals that you are whizzing past the things that truly matter? It's a question we should ask . . . and answer every day of our lives.
Peter +
