Monday, August 20, 2012

SHUCKING SHIELDS

[The following is a reprint of my blog of September 8, 2009.]

In my quiet time this morning, I was thinking of a friend who is going through hard times. She is a very inside-and-outside beautiful lady and a genius many times over. Her genius is her shield, and she reads obsessively to learn more and more and still more. The thought came to me that she needed to give up trying to learn and start trying to experience.

As I was pondering how to bring her this truth that would surely change her life, fix her, make her life wonderful, another thought came to me…that is me, and I’ve known that for years. Has that knowledge changed my life? Fixed me? Made my life wonderful? Well, it hasn’t hurt it, but it surely hasn’t made me any better than I’m meant to be.

I believe the gift of truly seeing me is in my acceptance of what I’m seeing, what I am, not so I can get busy and dig that out, change it, make it pretty so I’ll be more acceptable. It’s so I can laugh with God at how I take myself too seriously.

This shield, this live-by-the-book, I learned about me at least 30 years ago, and here’s me, seeing me yet again, now thinking it is someone else doing that. It is me I am seeing, still striving to learn from books, not to live it, but to know the answer of how to live it should the need arise…and I can tell “them” how to live it…or at least not look stupid for not knowing.

It’s all about shucking shields…or, as they sang in the 60s, “Let the sun shine in.”

Thank You.

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