Emancipator
What was it like my friend, If I may call you a friend, to scratch and scrawl on the back of the spade, only to have it erased by the rocks and sod?
Were you grieved to have your creation buried? Was it like laying out a corpse? No tombstone to commemorate its passing.
Did you hold a memorial service in your mind? Were there others who mourned with you? Did you grieve in silence, with no one to see your tears?
How lonely was it, you whose future seemed so dim? Dim, like the cabin in which your germinated thoughts took root?
Or, did the fields, in which your musings were planted, scream forth and comfort you?
Were you comforted in knowing the displaced ash was but a kernel which would later flower?
Did you have hope? Or, did your melancholy, which characterized your life, begin then?
Was your morose, like the deeply rooted weed, which spurned the very spade you loving labored to create upon?
Was your black mood a curse to be contended with? Or, did it fuel your passion to succeed?
Were you a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief? Were you a man who used grief as a means of liberation?
I find myself grieving with you. Then, with guilt and sense of recognition, I remember:
though you might have once despaired, you forged doggedly ahead to become the great emancipator!
How can I then stay in my sense of loss and self-absorption, seeing only weeds, when you allowed the crops of wisdom to nourish you.
-Richard L. Brewer
January 16, 1997
Published by sparedbygrace@yahoo.com
I am Richard Brewer—a Christ-follower, psychologist, husband, father, grandfather (Papa) sometimes writer, and lifelong student of people.
For much of my professional life, I've had the privilege of sitting with people as they wrestle with some of life's most difficult questions—questions about faith, suffering, grief, relationships, identity, failure, hope, and what it means to live well.
Those conversations have changed the way I see people and the way I understand my own faith. They have taught me that life is rarely as simple as our explanations of it, that people are almost always more complicated than they appear, and that sometimes the wisest response to a difficult question is to empathize and to keep asking better questions.
I am a committed Christ-follower, but I am not interested in pretending that Christianity eliminates mystery or that faith means having an answer for everything. Faith invites us to pursue truth honestly, to think deeply, to acknowledge what we do not know, and ultimately to trust the God we do know.
Mediocre Meanderings is where I explore some of those questions.
I write about faith and psychology, grief and suffering, leadership and relationships, aging and ordinary life—and occasionally whatever else catches my attention along the way.
I do not write from the perspective of someone who has figured life out. I write as someone who has lived enough of it to know that I have not.
These are my thoughts, questions, observations, and occasional attempts at wisdom. Take what is useful. Challenge what is not. And, if you would like, meander along with me.
View all posts by sparedbygrace@yahoo.com
Mediocre Meandering 