October 2018

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But may all who search for you be filled with joy and gladness in you.
Psalm 70: 4a


Doughnuts and Glitter

Above all, you must live as citizens of heaven, conducting yourselves in a manner worthy of the Good News about Christ (Philippians 1: 27)

            But what does that look like in everyday life?

Do everything without complaining and arguing, so that no one can criticize you. Live clean, innocent lives as children of God, shining like bright lights. . .(Philippians 2:14 – 15a).

            Everything? That seems a bit too much to ask. It must be that I need to look at things in a new way.

            When a friend, whose mother is in a dementia care unit, went to visit her the other day, she took one look at him and asked as any mother would who suspects her kid has been into something he shouldn't have been, "Have you been playing with glitter?"

            "Glitter? No, Mom, why?"

            "You have glitter in your hair. It looks like you've been playing with glitter."

            Now, this guy is in his mid-forties and his children are teenagers, so the likelihood of him playing with glitter is pretty slim. But he is starting to go gray. . . a sparkly, silvery gray. To his mother, this gray looked like glitter. Don't you just love that?

            My friend and everyone he tells this story to, has the opportunity to gain a new perspective on aging and gray hair, their own or someone else's. Going glitter is not something to complain about! It's something to rejoice in. Glitter is glamorous. Glitter is for parties, for celebrations!

            I had another perspective changing encounter a few days ago while I was standing in the checkout line at the grocery store. I'd already traipsed back and forth across campus a couple of times that day to reach the building where I teach which is located on the other side of campus from my office. Dodging the bicyclists, skateboarders, and motorized bike riders on the sidewalks of our busy campus is a "sport" that requires mindreading and great agility, neither of which I'm very good at, but, hey, so far so good.

            I had taught my three classes, fielded a lot of questions and emails, and had just spent more than half-an-hour trudging the aisles of this sprawling store to find everything on my list. I was tired and my feet hurt.

            My items were piled on the conveyer belt, waiting their turn much more patiently than I was when a family, a mother and her three children, pulled up behind me with an overflowing cart.

            The youngest child, a boy about five years old, was dancing in circles and singing loudly, "Happy dance! Happy dance! Happy dance!" In one hand he clutched a plastic container full of doughnut holes.

            "Wow! You're happy!" I said, smiling at the boy and his frazzled mother.

            "I have doughnuts!" he fairly shouted, and began kissing the domed lid of the container repeatedly and with force. He kissed it with such enthusiasm that his mother, after prying the container from his hand to place it on the conveyor belt, had to re-seal the lid.

            Suddenly, I was no longer thinking about my aching arches or all the grading I had ahead of me. I was thinking about this little boy's unbridled joy, and, well, doughnuts. Don't you just love that?

            Both my friend's story about glitter, and this little boy's dancing in the aisle like David rejoicing before the Lord, shed light and changed my perspective on things I had been inclined to complain about. I want to be a light like that, too. I want to live a clean, child-like life worthy of the Good News of Jesus. Lord, remind me to be intentional about looking for the glitter in every gray, the doughnut-hole-joy in the everyday of every day.

 Daye Phillippo

October 2018