The Life You Live

Dear Boo and Bubble,

On a recent trip down the mountain from home to Banner Elk, Captain and I passed the usual landmarks including Wraps Box & Ship, Puerto Nuevo Mexican Restaurant, Lowe’s Hardware, and The Best Western Motel. Just beyond the Best Western is the Banner Elk Seventh Day Adventist Church. Personal confession here, which I’m embarrassed to admit…the sum total of what I know about the church is that it is a Protestant Christian denomination which holds services on Saturdays rather than Sundays—thus, “Seventh Day.”

However, there is an aspect of this church’s physical campus with which I am very familiar—the marquee that fronts the road where revivals, poinsettia sales, funerals and other special activities are publicized. Occasionally, when nothing specific is going on at the church, the letters on the marquee normally reserved to advertise these various functions are converted into an inspirational quip—a short, yet noteworthy pronouncement that…the passing by of which…might trigger better aspirations from the passers-by.

As we rode by the church on that trip, the marquee read, “The Life You Live is The Lesson You Teach.”  

The words have stuck with me since then and, today — on the commemoration of the 75^th anniversary of D-Day — I decided my thoughts about its message should be shared with you.

First of all, it implies that life offers us a choice as to how we will live it. Will it be honorable? Will the things we say be true? Will people be able to rely on us? Will we be just? Will we be fair? Will we be generous and give back to a community that has been generous to us? When it is all said and done, will folks — especially our offspring — say “I really looked up to him or her?”

And…how do we learn these traits? The second part of the quote provides the answer. Someone teaches them to us through the example of how they live. In this regard, Captain and I are two of the luckiest people alive. We are blessed with lineages steeped in honor, commitment and sacrifice…and in the more intimate details of familial love and support.

Sometimes, however, things happen that alter the arc of one’s life…where you are called upon to respond to circumstances outside of the normal living of it…and you must draw on all the lessons of character you’ve been taught to make it through. These are times when we are called to fulfill a purpose outside of the norm…and, in these cases, we must rely not only on our own strength, but that of a collective higher power. Such was the case when the allied troops were called upon to storm the beaches of Normandy in France 75 years ago in the pivotal battle that turned the tide of World War II.

As always, whenever I want to find a better and more succinct way of explaining myself to you, I turn to your quadruple great grandfather, Joseph Benson Cottrell. In his writings of the mid-1800’s, he never fails to provide me a better perspective.

“The years of the history of this world circle one after another, not by any mere chance or accident of succession or relation. The actors upon this theatre do not appear self-appointed. When God wants anything done, He makes a man or a woman suitable to the work; and if people were only to do what they can do easily, the work for each of us would be accomplished. It is the unbelief of ambition that puts us on a strain; it is in some form or other, a lust that leads us through broad ways into a narrow one, which ends nowhere and in nothing. The most of men and women we meet are in return, with bowings and smiles apologetic, for having made just that mistake, or in frowning accusations against others for having forced them there.

The poet has written “it is the heart that giveth grace unto every work.” That is only another form of saying what Paul declared, that “it is with the heart man believed unto righteousness,” and that “the word is nigh unto us even in our heart and in our mouth,” qualifying us for right and great doing and saying.

One’s legitimate work is never his burden. But then, there are burdens legitimate. They are such as come upon us; not such as we pick up; and they are appointed upon us in the economy of tuition by which we are made to know that it is for us to “cast them upon the Lord.” Strange economy? Saith the reader? Even so. Yet it is just the experience that the burden is insupportable—unbearable—that acquaints us with the availability and the sufficiency of the love that “careth for us all.”