What I Miss

I miss my dad. I miss my mom.

I miss my Panda Mini Pro-Am BMX bike, and I miss 1982.

I miss coming home from school and eating two packages of Little Debbie Swiss Cake Rolls and washing them down with a glass of ice cold whole milk, because I could. There were no such things as calories, and processed food?  What did that even mean?

And I miss Math.

When I was in sixth grade, I could spell really well. Like really well. Like when it came time for Spelling, one other kid and I left the room because they ran out of words for us. Impressive?  Well, let me tell you, I’ve been a pastor for 25 years, and I still type Chruch and Scritpure at least 50 times a week.  So tanks for nuthin’, Danny Noonan.

But Math made sense. It was an equation that you couldn’t argue with, transitive, commutative properties. Geometry.  It made sense. That sheet they would give you with a bunch of intersecting lines on it?  They’d give you like two angles and you had to figure out the rest. I loved that sheet. It made sense.

But life is not Math, as much as we would like it to be.  There is no one formula that I find that makes sense.

I think we should stay closed, but I have friends who are self-employed and desperately want to get back to work.

When I think of a moratorium on evictions, it’s easy to get behind that when I think of large corporations owning huge apartment complexes.  But what about the guy who owns a 4-flat on the South side and counts on that income? It’s not the same formula.

I don’t know the answer for how to move forward in the next months for our town, state, country, or world.

The only thing I know is this, and it’s what I have held fast to for years. I need to think about more than what works for me. I need to think about what is good for the lady down the street, the guy in the city, and the family on the other side of the world. We are like lines on the geometry sheet, connected in some way.

It’s called loving my neighbor. Not always easy, but always right.

Peace.