re: #167 Mostly sane, most of the time.

So, I’m in the backyard scraping paint off of some chairs for a service project (don’t ask), and it’s kind of boring.

Here’s my thoughts: Do you suppose that Josiah Franklin, having had to give up on his dream of having Benjamin become a minister—do you suppose he saw this as a tragedy?

What about George Washington, whose mother refused to let him go to sea with the British Royal Navy? He undoubtedly would have been an admiral. He was simply too great not to be great.

Do we ever do this, in our smaller ways? Do we ever think we’ve lost, and that we’re not going to be what we were meant to be, and really, we’re just taking a different path? When and why? Because sometimes, someone can lose their way and fail to become what they might have been. Other times, they’re just going down a different path.

Scraping paint is really, really boring.

I was really struck, this past year, by a sermon that focused in on this bit from Genesis:

And Jacob said to Pharaoh, “The years of my pilgrimage are a hundred and thirty. My years have been few and difficult, and they do not equal the years of the pilgrimage of my fathers.”

The rabbi commented that when we look at Jacob we see a larger-than-life ancestor, the father of the tribes, a trickster, a visionary, the man who wrestled with God.

Asked how he sees himself, he says, “I’m an old man, and I’ve had a hard life.”

Because those setbacks? The ones we gloss over because it’s just part of the story? They really matter when you’re living them. He ran away from home because his brother wanted to kill him. He worked hard for the girl he wanted to marry, got tricked, and had to work longer for her. Brother shows up again, scares him. He had a terrifying encounter with something not of this world which injured him. He lost his wife, his daughter was raped, his sons disobeyed him in avenging her. He lost a son. That son has now been restored to him, at the price of finding out that most of the rest of them are jerks. One of the jerks recently raped his concubine.

Now he’s fleeing a famine.

He doesn’t see himself as someone chosen by God for anything good. He’s an old man who’s had terrible things happen to him.

This isn’t exactly what you’re talking about, but it brought it to mind.