Fencing

I wish I could sum up in a few words how we are all feeling at this time.  It is hard to come up with words, but it is also hard because everyone is feeling something different.  Some people show their feelings, some people bottle them up.  Some people show their feelings in ways that may be similar to us, some people don't.  Some people have good coping mechanisms in place, some people have turned to not so good means to cope.  What is important in this time is to understand we are all going through this "thing" together.

One of my coping mechanisms is television.  I become pretty dedicated to what I watch and while I some times watch things that are mindless ("The Real Housewives" franchise fall under this heading), I do watch some pretty emotional shows.  One of those shows is "This is Us".  Ugh.  I think I cry at some point during every episode.  It is that good.

For those of you who don't watch, the series focuses on a family of three siblings.  This family has experienced heartache and great triumphs.  You hit the first heart break in episode one...it is so good!  Last week was the premiere and the episode drew onto everything happening in our world...COVID, racial tensions, protests...plus all the tensions that the family is experiencing with what is going on with their own lives.  The focus for everyone was on what was going on in the world and the impact within their family.

Randall, one of the brothers, has a good wife named Beth.  She always knows what to say.  As Randall was struggling as a father, a son, a brother, and an African American man in the world today, Beth presented him with a great analogy.

Beth related the bad things, the sorrows, the sadness in life as fence posts.  They are these permanent markers in our lives that we remember.  We all remember all those things in our lives.  Where we were...the date...the year...our feelings at that exact moment.  Then Beth reminded Randall to look at what is in between those fence posts...all the things you hang on your fence posts.  Those are the good things in your life.

Right now, we seem to only see the fence post.  This moment in time is grounded in our memory.  But look back and look forward.  There are good things that have happened between your last fence post and this one.  There are good things that have happened since this fence post has been placed in the ground.  There is good out there still!

If you have ever helped with fencing, you know putting the post in the ground takes the most work.  It is where you see the sweat and tears.  What you hang on those posts takes not as much effort.  But it is what you hang on the posts that does all the magic.  It is what keeps the cattle in.  It is what keeps us as humans going!  

Think about what you have between your fence posts.  There are good things out there.  Keep hanging good things between your posts.