Pre-Birthday Ruminating

 

Ministerial Meditations

by The Rev. Connie Yost

July 22, 2013



Annie Oakley "Little Sure Shot" age 28, 1898



I recently flew to Los Angeles to meet with one of our Chalice Oak Foundation clients, the nonprofit 20KWatts, which brings solar lighting to desperately poor communities in Central America.  As I boarded the small commuter plane in Long Beach to return home, I found my seat next to a young girl who was sitting next to the window.   I settled into my seat and asked her if she was travelling alone.  Limpid blue pools looked straight at me and she kindly but firmly announced that she was.  "I'm old enough," she told me.  "People don't think that I am, but I am.  I'm fourteen."  Impressed with her self-possession, I struggled with what to say next.  Certainly I would NOT say that she didn't look fourteen.  She knows that; everyone always says that.  And I remember how much I always hated people telling me that I didn't look my age (when I was younger, mind you!).

So I said, "Well, that's very good.  I know how annoying it is when people think you're a lot younger than you are.   They treat you like you don't know anything.  I always hated that."  "Yes," she agreed.  "It is annoying," she said and calmly went on reading her book.

I didn't start travelling alone much less on an airplane until I was much much older than fourteen.  But then, I was raised in the pre-feminist dark ages, discovering my own womanpower well into my thirties and with little support from my parents or society.  I wondered how my life might have turned out had I been as empowered as she when I was 4'7" and weighed 80 lbs.

Give it Some Time

Ministerial Meditations

by The Rev. Connie Yost

July 2, 2013

Management guru Peter Drucker

I recently saw the movie, Before Midnight in which a committed couple with a long history argue and say some terrible things to each other, but clearly love each other.  She says she doesn't love him and he knows she doesn't mean it  --  probably, maybe, hopefully.  There's a threat on the horizon, that he'll give in to the need to move to Chicago to be near his son, and she will have to decide to either go with him, giving up her career and current life, or not.  How to make that choice?  Better to decide now that she doesn't love him and it is over.  She decides.  Not him.  Now, not later.  Case closed.

Only life doesn't work like that.  Well, I guess you can make it work like that--you can preempt things by making defensive moves, but I think that's a mistake.  I understand the impulse though.  It always feels better to me when I think I am in control of a situation, no matter how wrong my decision may be in the grander scheme of things.  There's just something so primeval about needing to feel in control of our own destiny -- safe -- that we can actually do things that hurt us and lead us far astray from our life force and true passions.