People Who Haven't A Clue They Changed My Life

 The LIFE book 100 People Who Changed The World is not on my coffee table. It is not in my bookcase. It is not anywhere in my house...

...nor are there many traces of influence from 99 of these "100 most influential people" in my life. The only one who qualifies as having changed my world is the living word of God, the one LIFE identifies as "Jesus." 

The others are a cast of characters who have maybe influenced someone's culture, but they certainly have not touched mine.

But what I really want to explore instead is the 100 people who have randomly had an impact on my life and who haven't a clue that they did.

Like the keeper of the unabridged dictionary in the school library when I was growing up. I looked up to that nerd, not just because he was keeper of the book, but because he could actually carry it down the stairs.

And that pretty freshman cheerleader who sat behind me in study hall...who, unlike many of the others, had a personality more interesting than a candy wrapper, and did not want to make a move on every high school quarterback.

Or, that mind-numbingly wealthy Slavic girl in college who didn't seem to have a clue about the poor and oppressed, who inspired me to write poetry exposing the lack of compassion for the downtrodden by the social elite.

Or, that freshman who came into the donut shop after the bars closed and propped her feet up on a table in the corner, too drunk to walk alone to her dorm room, inspiring me to walk her home, as if she was my own daughter...instead of seeing her as a possible date.

Or, that anemic-looking character who stood on the corner trying to scam money out of passing former WalMart customers so she could buy her next heroin fix. Addicted. Dying. Living in a roach-infested apartment across from the Salvation Army. But God had told me to stop and take her into the store and buy her food...and socks... because He had compassion...and that, and her utter poverty of spirit, changed me.

Or, that guy who came running out the middle of a wilderness area ...running across the road to my car, where I had been enjoying the view. I drove him 45 minutes down the mountain to a pay phone so he could call for a chopper to fly one of the boy scouts to a hospital. So now, while I am as cautious as the other guy, I do believe there are divine appointments...

and there are so many more...and you could add you own here, but suffice to say, there have been so many people who have changed my life, just by their presence, just by being in the right place at the right time...or the wrong place at the right time...

....but they have no clue how they have changed my life.

who are the random people who have changed your life?

no more poop in the coop

 chickens running free through sweet meadows and forests, clucking their way into the sunset, free to run across the range…smiling, happy chickens…spreading their wings under the vast blue skies, with no….

caca grande en la casa

this bucolic vision of bird heaven reminds us all that it is a much better world we live in when we too are freed from the coop full of poop- in the Big Coop with the Big Rooster.

The Big Rooster rules the roost in the Big Coop because that is the way things go. The way things have always gone. That is what they say. That ubiquitous they. And they are always right, even when they are wrong.

The Big Coop is a clucking palace, where the chickens cluck away, strutting about as if taking selfies, running into their neighbors, eating everything in sight, and decorating the floor with verbal and visible manure. They may be clucking about The Big Rooster,  but their clucking is so loud that even the Big rooster rarely hears them. This keeper of the coop ensures that weak ones die, that clucking continues, and that the order of all things remains in his power. The growing mounds of shite collect, members oblivious to their smell, and sometimes oblivious to their presence,  with no…

prospect of freedom from the decay surrounding them.

But I am not speaking of chickens, I am speaking of weak souls…weak, pellet-fed souls repressed by a religious regime where an autocrat rules inside a boxed-in world…

that Jesus never came to proclaim…instead, He proclaimed…

 “A time is coming, and is come, when the true worshippers will  worship the Father in spirit and truth; for indeed the Father seeks such worshippers. God is spirit, and His worshippers must worship in spirit and truth.”

“Do you not know that you are a temple of the Holy Spirit?”

Jesus did not come to establish the coop mentality. He came to destroy the man-made temple. The age Jesus came in was filled with temples worshipping gods. He came to see that all would be filled with the Holy Spirit, becoming temples of the living God.

If you are a temple, you have no need to be confined inside someone else’s temple culture, with its pagan rituals that stink to high heaven. Jesus came to give you freedom to live outside the religious building structure and its self-made gods of Big Egos. He came to create an environment where you, like free range chickens, can network and live free in healthy community, with…

no more poop in the coop.

the other language

how can I share what air cannot reveal,

what eyes cannot reach,

what words cannot contain?

though the wind whisper it,

my ears cannot translate for you,

only these lips that speak without thought

thoughts as a vapor rising.

The Society For The Prevention of Abuse To Unabridged Dicitonaires

 

When I was in school, the unabridged dictionary sat like an alien death weapon on a podium too small for the monstrosity. Most of the boys and girls in my class were afraid to even touch it. The librarian treated it like some kind of ancient relic from Vulcan.

Then, one day, it disappeared. It was piled in a gargantuan book-pyramid with numerous other dishonored lonely books. The speckled-faced librarian gathered them in a wheelbarrow and positioned them behind a hideously wide red truck.

In the morning, as I walked to school, I saw the red truck parked haphazardly upon the mound beyond the northern end of the school building. I walked over, peered into the bed. Below the truck bed, a few pieces of browned paper lay scattered about. I reached down and found they were crumpled into dust when touched.

The unabridged dictionary- along with other notable books- met their death that day…before I found the remnants of ash-like fragments.

I confess today that I do not own an unabridged dictionary. Someday, I will buy one….in secret. But for now, it has become a problem.

It is because I get words stuck in my head and often have to search to find their meaning.  So many times I cannot find it in any of the mamby-pamby dictionaries online or in any public library.

In fact, while I was dour, writing a very serious post, I got a word stuck in my head. Not like a song stuck in my head, but an “unknown” (for best effects, please pronounce with a Scottish accent) word. I flung open my dictionaries, scavenged the online dictionary venues, to no avail. I nearly flailed myself upon a piece of plastic to buy a subscription to the unabridged dictionary online…OK, I am exaggerating…but repented when I did some cost analysis.

You can read an account of my Shakespearean disgust at not finding that word in one of my former posts. 

But for now, I am calling on all students of life... those graduates from the University of hard knocks, soft knocks, and knock knocks, to rally the troops and demand your local library association bring back the massive volume of The Fun Stuff.