The saying in my high school yearbook said, “Life is like an
onion. You peel away each layer and sometimes you cry.” I thought it was a beautiful, meaty statement
about life when I was 17.
I look at
life differently now. The onion metaphor does not seem to work for me any more. As I get older, I
do not think as often of peeling away something on a regular basis to get to the end: an
end, which is an empty nothing, like the inside of an onion. It seems somewhat pessimistic. Though perhaps, I missed
something in my understanding of this onion.
I think of my life as more like an oak tree
that each year gains a growth ring. In
good years there is a lot of growth added to the trunk and in other years the
growth is smaller. The growth we gain
each year is the character we build and what we do with our lives to help us become
stronger and align ourselves more to God’s plan for His people.
The title of the book, The Things They Carried, is an interesting title to a book that is
not as good as the title. It makes me
think of what we carry with us through life and what that says about our
character. It makes me think of what we
would carry out of a burning house or what we would pick if we could only keep
a few of our possessions. It makes me
think of ladies’ purses and what they value enough to take with them everywhere.
Then, it causes
me to think of invisible things that I carry with me from year to year and what
those things say about me. Is life a
peeling away like an onion or building of layers like an oak? Maybe it is both.
What thoughts,
ideas, habits and qualities do we carry with us from year to year? Peel away the bad, the unnecessary, and the
sin and build the layers of strength, character and sense of purpose. Whichever the case, as it goes with peeling
away, so it does with strengthening and character building: sometimes we
cry.
I revised my two
page resume last night. I peeled away
the unnecessary, the padding and I just went for the truly most important
highlights of my career. My resume is
now, at over 30 years of teaching, smaller than it was at two years’ experience. Does that mean that I have not done much
lately or does it mean that I am finally able to see what is important? I hope
it means the latter. Yet, I wonder: is my life more than a little piece of
paper that speaks of my career? What is
worth carrying and what is not?
What really mean
something are the intangible qualities that I hope I have that no one can peel
away, pare away or take away. The
intangible qualities that will show my Maker that I have grown in the ways that
are important are what I am interested in keeping and transporting on life’s
exciting journey. I hope that the things
that I carry are things like love, joy and peace.
