"Shades...................................."

It’s early Saturday morning here, some rain over night reportedly about to bring us down into some cooler temperatures for a few days. My job at school is seemingly turning into a repetition of last year, the economy and the numbers game causing a necessary merger of three Special-Ed units into two, no assistants added until we “prove” that we need them. Is it just coincidence, I wonder, that in visiting Robert Fulghum’s blog site, I discovered a recent post speaking of “altitude” being a matter of “attitude”? Truthfully, this fellow is about as far away from my own spiritual conclusions as anyone could be; and, if we really knew one another, it remains to be seen how well conversation between us would go. Reading his mind in print suffices for me, ardent debate not something I pursue. When he writes of “metaphorical lenses buried deep in our brains and psyche”, however, it seems to me that the two of us might enjoy a bit of discussion, his brain apparently somewhat in tune with mine about a few things. Love, prejudice, comedy, pessimism, optimism, experience, and religion are all listed as “frames of reference that bend the light of fact and truth”, shaping our vision either for ill or good and leading to clarity or distortion. “Nobody,” he says, “sees things as they are.” Nothing I haven’t heard before; but enough to give me pause and make me ponder. I am well acquainted with how people, far beyond simply separating themselves one from the other, often enter into war over “visional” differences of opinion. Politics, at the moment, has us all on an emotional high. For me, though, whether it be who occupies the White House for the next four years or what this change in our room will mean in terms of stress, it’s not so much my own outlook I want to steer by, but His. That “anchor-line” also serves as an “umbilical cord”, providing me therefore, not only with a tug on my tendency to overheat, but a peace in spite of the storm as well.