It is pretty easy to increase blood pressure and anxiety given the current state of things. I need to limit my dose of reading news stories, looking deliberately for stories that are hopeful and encouraging. I don’t want ‘he who shall not be named’ to dominate my conversations and reading. Too easily I let that happen. Japanese American artist Makoto Fujimura writes this lovely antidote called What If?
"To say "I have a dream today" is to plant seeds of hope in the arid soil of disappointment and despair; to say “I have a dream” today is to raise seedlings of joy and peace in the midst of the bitter taste of suffering and injustice; to say “I have a dream” today is to water the “oaks of righteousness” (Isaiah 61:3) in a land full of fissures of division and polarization. To say “I have a dream today” is to--even in tainted ground such as Japanese soil poisoned by the fallout of nuclear attacks—plant sunflower seeds, as one Japanese farmer did soon after the 3/11 tsunami catastrophe. He planted them because sunflowers remove the radioactive isotopes out of the soil. To say “I have a dream” today is to create beauty as the pursuit of the “substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.” (Hebrews 11:1)
To nurture the soil of culture, we must learn to see with “the eyes of our hearts” (Ephesians 1:18) beyond fear, beyond anxiety, and beyond despair. Be patient and long-suffering; love deeply; nurture the soil of imagination, gestating in faith until we can give birth to that city of our better angels. What if we did that? We would find a city filled with the aroma of the new, emanating out of the extravagant, with denizens like bright flowers turning their heads toward the sun. Out of the trauma of our times and the disillusionments of our days, God would birth something true, good, and beautiful."
More planting today.