By Ed Chasteen
Most any mechanical toy or game bought in any store comes with this notice enclosed, signifying that the energy that activates the device is to be found in some other place. The game of life comes with a similar warning, though not written in such clearly understood fashion. “Meaning not included.” That’s what is written every time a baby is born anywhere on the planet. Having survived the Holocaust, Victor Frankl wrote Man’s Search for Meaning, in which he contends that the meaning of life is to make it have meaning.
Unless and until a life makes meaning, it is not life at all. Such power does meaning have to energize a life that we do it grave injustice when we think it is to be easily or quickly found. Rather it must be mined from deep within our inner resources. Meaning is made as those inner resources do battle with all the outer circumstances and conditions. Hypocrisy, injustice, poverty, hatred, and all their kin must be worked into the love and sacrifice and selflessness afoot in the world. To put it all together in a way that gives meaning is the meaning.
These thoughts are playing in my head as I drive in the rain from Liberty with Cindy Harvey. She drove in from their home in Kearney. Met me in front of Biscari Brothers Bicycles, where she and Brian, Cindy’s husband, meet up with our Greater Liberty Riders most every Saturday morning for a ride to breakfast in some nearby town. This morning Cindy and I are headed to meet Yahya and Zakia, his wife.
A few weeks back Yahya had a quadruple heart-bypass. Then their house burned. As a disabled Vietnam veteran with a large family, Yahya has too little money and no house insurance. They lost everything. Then their car quit. I sent out an email appeal for help. Yahya is a dear friend. We have traveled the country together, teaching people how to like each other.
Christmas is near. After a recent Saturday morning ride, Brian came to look at Yahya’s burned house and figure out how he might help. He’s working in Arizona. Flies back on weekends. He and Cindy ride with us on Saturday when their girls don’t have soccer or other activities. The family will move to Arizona when they sell their house and the school year ends.
I got an email from Cindy the other day. “We started a new family tradition several years ago in which we take all the money we used to spend on each other and adopt a family in need instead and spend it on them. We talked it over and decided that this year we would like to adopt your friend whose house burned down.”
Already from my emails, Yahya and Zakia and their children have received furniture, money, a car, a laptop computer. Now this morning, Cindy will sit and talk with Zakia, mother to mother, about how the two families can help each other. One by giving the gift of being willing to receive; the other, by giving. A reciprocal relationship that forges meaning for members of two families from sickness and disaster.
Back home by noon, I take up my post outside Wal-Mart for another hour ringing bells for the Salvation Army. Daughter, Debbie, takes my place at one o’clock. Wife, Bobbie, replaces Debbie at two. Bobbie has spent untold hours calling hundreds of people to enlist them as bell ringers. The two of us have put in more than 80 combined hours ringing. The $70,000 and more we raise stays here in Liberty to fund InAsMuch Ministry, our local effort to care for our local folks whose lives have not gone as they hoped.
More than 40 years now Bobbie and I have lived in our town where we both taught. Living in the same house where Debbie, Dave and Brian grew up. Debbie and husband, Ed, and daughter, Laura, now live across town. Dave and Brian just a few miles away.
We have all made meaning for our lives. Here among friends, we find ways to make our world as life should be: a place where people know and care about one another.
As I’m writing this letter at Christmas time, my cell phone rings. Ahmed El-Sherif invites me to go with him in the spring to a HateBusters conference in Amman, Jordan.
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