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Live from October 1st filming
Her name was Sada. She was my grandma.
Looking back, she was about as cranky as they come. I guess she wasn’t terribly thrilled about having three daughters of her own, so the second crop coming out of the field didn’t exactly impress her. She did two things really well–kept her house clean and she made blackberry pies.
I thought they were the best in the world. Of course, being ten years old, I had no point of reference, nor had I ever attended a bake-off. So about every two weeks, I asked her if she would make one of her delicious pies for my enjoyment. Her response was always the same. “If you want a pie, you’re going to have to go pick the fruit and bring it to me.”
I hated this. I never enjoyed picking blackberries. Built into the consciousness of every blackberry is a decision to reap as much havoc with its thorns as possible in exchange for being extracted from its home. Hanging around the patch were also bees, which scared me to death because I was ten years old and a had the backbone of a jellyfish. In addition, it takes quite a few blackberries to make a pie and often I brought back only enough blackberries for my grandma to sneer at, saying, “Humph. There’s not enough there for a tart.”
I didn’t know what a tart was, but assumed it meant I was not going to be eating any pies soon. So I eventually discovered that a little orange pail I used for Halloween candy was the perfect size to make two pies when filled up to the top. But every time I asked her if we could just buy the blackberries from the store, she would just shake her head and repeat,”You bring the fruit and I’ll make the pie.”
This story came back to my mind over the past twelve days while I’ve been battling with my legs and walking. As I have told you, at first I fully intended to exercise my God-given right to be discouraged over my ailment. Then I took some time to think about it. You see, thinking is an annoying process. When you get to the end of reasoning out some matter, you always discover that it wasn’t what you thought it was in the first place, and that much of the problem is you.
I believe this is why most people skip the step of thinking and immediately leap to worry. Worrying grants you the dignity of blaming everything under the sun except yourself. As I did my thinking, I realized that at sixty years of age, being extremely obese and continuing to pursue my lifestyle of travel and sharing with great vigor, I was accidentally killing myself off.
It’s not that I have a death wish. (None of us actually has to wish for our demise. It will eventually come.) Rather, it was a piece of stubbornness that insisted that I should be able to freeze my mission in time because the end result of doing it was helpful. Therefore, God needed to overlook my age, my weaknesses and the fact that I was a “fatty-fatty-big-butt” and honor me with reasonable health “because I was doing my best to bless others and serve Him.”
It was downright bratty.
But it didn’t feel that way. I called it faith.
How can you know when you have bratty faith? Bratty faith is when you demand that God do something for you that He is not doing for someone else because you think you’re prettier. I realized that with my temporary setback in walking, that God, like my grandma, was telling me to “get the fruit” so that He could legitimately make the pie.
I believed His phrasing would be more like: “Stop dying and start trying.”
I was asking God to keep me safe from my own devious plan of excess stupidity and ignorance, and make my only responsibility to be there for the show.
Yes, the first step for everything in life is to stop dying.
And of course, there are many ways to die. (Anybody who has ever gone on stage can tell you that.)
- You can die in your excesses or you can die in your lack.
- You can die in your ignorance and you can die in your arrogance.
- You can die in your hope and you can die in your doubt.
- You can die in your religion or you can die in your agnosticism.
- You can die in your lifestyle or you can die in your bad habits.
Death is whenever we pretend that we don’t understand the wisdom that has been provided for us and instead, we wait for a different explanation so we can escape change.
I didn’t realize it, but inch by inch I was dying, and expecting God to do daily miracles to do CPR on my gradually decaying corpse. He, being the Gentleman He is, simply took my legs out from under me so I could use the brain half of my body instead of the feet portion. Through that, I learned to start trying.
I am on my twelfth day of an exciting food regimen which has already borne “blackberries in my pail.” Yes, I am on my way to making a pie.
I was able to get out of my van yesterday in the parking lot of Wal-Mart, and using a shopping cart, I walked 259 steps without falling over. More blackberries.
I have not missed a performance–because I have found a wheelchair which will haul my backside from place to place, to continue to impart the little bit I know to those sent my way. Avoiding the bees, I put some blackberries in my pail.
And I have focused on health as the leading virtue towards wealth and being wise, thus avoiding the thorns and deriving fruit.
If you want to understand the ways of spirituality, you must comprehend that you have to stop dying to start trying. If you want to wait until God is forced through Mother Nature to intervene and cut you off at the knees, you may feel free to do so. Or you can look at the little pieces of death that are going on in your heart, soul, mind and strength right now–and stop the emergency before your situation becomes grave.
259 steps may not sound like much to you, but in my spiritual over-exuberance, I envision a heavenly cheer from a legion of angels.
“Bring the fruit. And I’ll make that pie.”
Exactly.
And the words from God to each and every one of us are, “Stop dying and start trying.”
The producers of jonathots would humbly request a yearly subscription donation of $10 for this wonderful, inspirational opportunity
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