Love is the Way by Michael B. Curry

Author:Michael B. Curry [Curry, Michael B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-09-21T22:00:00+00:00

Our Job Is to Do Our Job

On November 9, 2016, the day after the presidential election, I was sitting with a group of younger members of my staff. Some of them were like zombies, not sure whether they could put one foot in front of the other. After a great step forward, many saw this as a devastating step back. I had been as shocked as anyone by the news, but I had been prepared for such a moment by my upbringing. The struggle continues were the words a childhood friend of mine always used to sign off letters to me, and those words ran through my head and my heart that morning.

I gathered my staff to try to reset the tone—very gently, because emotions were high, and they were real. “This feels like the end of the world, but it’s not,” I told them. “It’s just the struggle continuing. We didn’t see this coming, but it doesn’t erase the progress before it. It’s just the struggle continuing.” Our job is to do our job in God’s great movement of love in this world.

And whatever the present loss, that great movement continues. Some years ago now I found myself stranded in an airport during a snowstorm. This was before iPads had arrived to keep me busy, so I purchased a little book to read. It was Tuesdays with Morrie, by Mitch Albom, who was then a sports reporter for ESPN and the Detroit Free Press. “Morrie” was Morrie Schwartz, one of Mitch’s professors from college. After many years apart, they rekindled their friendship. But as it turned out, the professor was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Lou Gehrig’s disease. As you probably know, there is no cure for the disease, and it is fatal.

Almost every Tuesday, Mitch would visit Morrie, the student with his professor again. The book is about the wisdom shared and learned from his professor’s greatest lecture. Near the end, Morrie told his student one last story.

There was once a wave, “bobbing along in the ocean, having a grand old time.” All was well and the wave was enjoying himself. He was just enjoying the wind and the ride, until one day he noticed what was happening to the other waves in front of him. They were crashing against the shore. “My God, this is terrible,” the wave said. “Look what’s going to happen to me!” Then another wave came along who asked, “Why do you look so sad?” The first wave says, “You don’t understand! We’re all going to crash! All of us waves are going to be nothing! Isn’t it terrible?” The other wave’s response: “No, you don’t understand. You’re not a wave, you’re part of the ocean.”

The nature of existence is that you get knocked back. You weep, you fuss, you cuss, and you learn from it. Then you get up and go forward again, knowing that you’ve got the force of the ocean behind you. Progress does happen, but not always when we want it to, or in the way we think it will.

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