The 3 Gaps by Hyrum W. Smith

Author:Hyrum W. Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Published: 2015-03-16T04:00:00+00:00

Chia Pets

Most things, especially in the media, change often across the arc of our lifetime. One that never seems to change—in fact won’t go away—are the seasonal advertisements (usually at Christmastime) for Chia Pets, those clay heads of cartoon characters, small animals, or even political figures. Each kit contains the clay figure, which needs to be soaked overnight in water, followed by a paste of soil and seeds to smear all over the figure. If the Chia Pet is kept properly watered—not too much or too little—the seeds sprout and create a pretty, green fringe that brings the hard edged, clay figure into a soft, natural beauty. That’s the Chia Pet: from dead clay to living green—in a few weeks—with the right attention.

I think that those little seeds, waiting to be born, represent our values. In each seed, as in each value, is the potential for life, but only if it is properly nurtured. If our values remain as ideas in our mind or words on a page they are just seeds—ideas with the potential to close the gaps in our lives. But if we want them to go to work and help us close gaps, we must nourish them, feed them, and help them come to life.

There are a lot of ways to nurture our values, to bring them to life. We can, of course, do that nurturing on our own, through our own thoughts and efforts. But in my experience, our values flourish earlier, grow faster, and become a lasting, living part of our lives much more powerfully, when others are involved in tending to the growth of those values.

Family is one key to nurturing values. My mother and grandmother taught me the framework of my earliest values: strength, resilience, faith, and hard work. They shared with me both the experiences and the lessons that conveyed those values; they helped the values sink deep into my soul. Family feeds our bodies and then feeds our souls. Family helps us get beyond just surviving and helps us learn how to thrive—how to go from being worried about the gap between dinnertime and enough dinner to eat or the gap that comes with delaying gratification.

But what happens with people who have no family, or those who are in a dysfunctional family—one that can’t get beyond survival, that might even be cruel or abusive? Who’s going to water and feed that child’s values and aspirations? I’ve spent my life around people who had less-than-complete or less-than-ideal families. And I’ve seen extended family members rise up in all kinds of places to fill gaps—grandmothers helping mothers where fathers have deserted them, fathers without wives present, and children without parents being raised by grandparents. I’ve seen extended family—aunts, uncles, cousins, neighbors, pastors and priests, and community leaders—step in to fill the gaps in both formal and informal ways. And I’ve watched them nurture children—not just filling their basic survival needs, but answering the deep longing to be something, to achieve their dreams, to find what they value and to live it.

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