Monday, May 4, 2026
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Just an inch or so
The Holy Spirit will teach you everything
and remind you of all I told you.
In the Creative Community Project, folks in the group welcomed newcomers with a lovebomb. They took a moment to say hello, listen well, say good honest things they observed, invite their guests to help them cut up vegetables in the kitchen, and then sit down at low tables, legs crossed, pray and tear their sandwiches in half and share both halves with their neighbors. After a bit, the guests got the idea and tore their sandwiches too, and gave them away. The food really did seem to multiply.
Bob Huneycutt and I both experienced this when we encountered the group of Hearst Avenue, Berkeley in 1976. Both of us were relatively armored over by the lives we lived, so at first we resisted. Bob’s stories are in his books. My story is somewhere, but the point today is just that it happened again today, not in Rev. Moon’s California community, but in Austin, at Grace Covenant Church across the street from our apartment complex in a class we generally attend each week called Empty Nesters.
These folks are getting older, and Margaret and I are two of the oldest. Today’s leader Gary asked us to take a 36 inch paper sewing ruler, tear off the number of years (centimeters) we’ve lived so far from the left. I tore mine off at 76 . Then I tore off the other end from the right up to my actuarial life expectancy if we make it to age 65 (for guys that’s 83, for women 86). What’s left? Well …
Not much. A postage stamp. Fred, next to me, hollered to the group, “We have a winner!”
I put the precious piece of paper into my tin of messiah mints for safekeeping. Laughing … and appreciating one more visual reminder of how life is short.
I also realized, and pointed out to Fred and our table, that this tiny piece of life I have left has every right to be enriched. Honey pours down on it, and it gets thicker and sweet. It ages in the cellar alongside the wine and whiskey and gets more precious and rare. And the smaller, the better. Soak it in, baby.
At this moment, our daughter in law and one of my best friends are flying home from Nashville through the dark night. They don’t know each other, they are flying to different cities. Their life rulers are longer than mine just because they’re younger. Their lives would not fit easily into my messiah mint tin. But long ago they each learned to be grateful. They are both noticers, and cherishers of what they have right now, with God and the god-with-skin-on friends, family, strangers, pilots, stewardesses, fellow passengers …
At church I could almost feel how my little postage stamp life was getting soaked with oil and honey. So many folks were praying for me. And that’s what I pray for Melissa and Shannon too, on their SW airline jets, oil soaking in, moment by living moment.
Sitting at the table in class my little postage stamp life was hard to get hold of to store in the mint tin. Its casket, so to speak. Imagine as it becomes soaked with oil and honey and life. Harder still.
God, please lend me a pair of Your Tweezers so I can cherish the life you’ve given me, instead of trying to pick it up on my own and have it fall apart.
May we be blessed by the LORD,
who made heaven and earth.
Heaven is the heaven of the LORD,
but the earth he has given to the children of men.
Not to us, O Lord, but to your name give the glory.
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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