Thought for The Day - Following The Pattern

"I have no choice..."

We need "expertise" to back up our hypothesis...

I've talked about it before, my new hobby: aquariums. As in plural, as in more than one. For me a dream and nearly overnight. In my 10 gallon, I have 5 Buenos Aires Tetra and 3 Red Eye Tetra. You can barely tell them apart and though the Buenos Aires came first, when the Red Eye were added, they learned quickly to do as the predominant group does. When they stand in formation, seemingly floating in space, little or no movement, you do the same. Or else, there's a nip here, and chase there. When the leader breaks formation, you wait a few seconds, then you break formation. But slowly, everyone does the same thing.

When we were children, we learned to speak the language, avoid hot surfaces and to sit up straight - I've struggled with the last one all my life, with a natural curvature of the spine. We learned - if we wanted to accomplish anything in life - to wake at the right time, what to eat for breakfast, which classmates to avoid and those that should be friends. Some lessons we learned the hard way, others, we simply accepted.

As adults, "success" is defined as a family, a home or apartment, a job and a car. While the world has been 'kind' and not required we all be accountants, doctors and attorneys, it has not been kind in telling us teachers, dancers, writers and artists are second class citizens; "you don't earn enough" or shouldn't "to contribute to the fabric of society. And yet, it is the individual who quietly or raucously, follows their own 'inner pattern' that blows the doors off our mundane lives EVERY TIME!

Some stand out as strange and eccentric and rarely outgrow that title. Some are just close enough to "normal" that they dazzle us with their eccentricity and yet do it with a quiet humility. But in my mind, everyone has the potential to be AMAZING!

For about 15 years, I secretly held the opening thought as my marching orders. "I had no choice" to be a minister, work in an office where no matter how well I served, I would remain a 'second class citizen.' I had little or no choice regarding with whom I spent Sunday afternoons or the movies and television shows I was allowed to see as a Christian...

But I do now! I'm choosing to break many of the patterns that define me and redefining the parts of me that no one knows. I'm declaring I AM AN ARTIST, and A CHRISTIAN! I'm saying quite emphatically that God loves diversity and the "oddballs" as well as the person who may never stray beyond the comforts of the sacred four walls. He love and celebrates the people who love with everything they have! He even loves those whose heart remains an open wound because it gets cut, bruised by those they love...