The Center Will Hold by Christopher de Vinck

Author:Christopher de Vinck
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL036000, RELIGION / Inspirational, OCC011020, BODY, MIND & SPIRIT / Healing/Prayer & Spiritual, Christian inspirational, Catholicism books, Christian self help
ISBN: 9780829449303
Publisher: Loyola Press
Published: 2020-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

For the work you have given me, I praise you Lord;

for the fruits of my labor, I thank thee.

Copyright Chicago Tribune, used under license.

29

Our Potential

Many are the plans in a person’s heart

but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails.

—Proverbs 19:21

Autumn is the season of humility. Leaves begin to accept their changing colors and age. The beach waters submit to the lowering temperatures. Children put away their shorts and swimsuits and accept the power the school bell has over their lives. But there is one brave element in autumn that seems to retain power and strength: the humble acorn.

When I was a boy, I sat high in an oak tree one October, knowing that my mother would soon sit at the base of her favorite tree to spend a bit of quiet time away from the noise of her six children. My mother arrived, spread a blanket, and sat in her renewed peace, but then a single acorn dropped beside her. She picked it up. Another dropped on her head. She reached up and stroked her hair. After the third falling acorn, she looked up and saw the teasing wave of my hand. She smiled and called me down beside her, her autumn boy, and she held me in an embrace that I still savor.

As I grew a bit older, I felt I was more a man than a boy, for men smoked pipes. I took an acorn, drilled a small hole with a nail, and stuck a thin stick into the hole: voilà an autumn pipe.

But like the ant or bee, often the smallest things in nature have the greatest power. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote from his home in Concord, Massachusetts, in the late 1800s: “The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.”

Children take twenty or thirty years to mature, but the brave acorn matures in six to twenty-four months, rich in nutrients: it contain carbohydrates, fats, and protein and is packed with vitamins B12, B6, folate, riboflavin, thiamine, calcium, phosphorus, potassium, and niacin.

To me, the acorn is a symbol for the great potential within all of us: this small package that, with the proper conditions of light and moisture, will grow into a seventy- or one hundred–foot tree and produce 2,000 acorns a year that constitute 25 percent of a deer’s diet in the fall.

The playwright George Bernard Shaw wrote, “Think of the fierce energy concentrated in an acorn! You bury it in the ground, and it explodes into an oak! Bury a sheep, and nothing happens but decay.”

When children go off to school this fall season, sit with them under the oak tree; place an acorn in the palm of their hands and tell them that they, like the acorn, hold great power within themselves. They, like the acorn, hold great potential, and they can grow, extend their rich minds and bodies into the forest of this sometimes dry and empty land we call reality.

Tell the children that there is much to living if we plant ourselves deeply in the soil of goodness, education, and hope for the future.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.