Space

My pet peeve?  Pet peeves, probably.  I guess you can have them as long as you don't think that others really care about what your pet peeve is.  Look, we all got issues, right?  Anyway I was reminded of my pet peeve recently.  I offer it only in the spirit of insight.  It's when you try to put some pepper on something at a restaurant and the pepper shaker is so full of pepper that none will come out.  Because its so full of pepper.  Because somebody thought: the more pepper the better.  So you have to take off the top and shake some out and then invariably too much comes out.

Can we leave some room in the shaker so the pepper will come out?  We have to be careful about cramming so much stuff in that we don't allow room for the action to take place: for the contents to be shared.  

Today I'm thinking about that space as the room we need to allow for dreams.  On the website, in the ministry activity, in the planning, in the meeting, on the calendar, through the leadership.  We have to allow space for some dreams.  If you have ever seen the realization of a dream you know how important it is.

This summer, we dreamed a little about taking the opportunity to not just build a house with our habitat for humanity project, but also spending some time on building communities.  We went to the trouble of lugging a grill out to the site and handing out fliers for the cookout several days in advance.  Not too many folks came out, but a few did.  "It" seemed to happen.

I was kind of taken about when on a clay hill beside the house, I saw "little black boys and black girls joining hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers."  Well maybe not exactly as sisters and brothers.  And maybe they didn't actually join hands.  But they were playing together.  As members of the same community.  And I thought about the space it takes to dream.