Wrong word - unnerves me.
Because I know what I am capable of if I were to let things get out of hand. I exhaust myself within hours each day, trying to keep a handle on the emotions that are still at war within me, dealing with people who only see their agendas at the expense of others including myself and those I love.
Yet I battle through it because the consequences of failure are the unacceptable misery of those I fight for.
I've always felt at peace in the Arctic because I'm so far removed from the petty and shallow that sparks these conflicts within me, including my own imperfections in that confusion. There's no deception in the reality of ice and wind, and I deal well with that.
The costs for success or failure are real, not smeared with the selfish lust for empty power over others around you. Virtual "reality" has no place there - you either make it, or you don't.
In the world around me now, I see so much of stupid ambition that does nothing but destroy the hopes and lives of good people. There are many who are only trying to make the world a sane, stable place where we can live together in real peace and happiness, uplifting and sustaining each other in honesty and kindness. In that environment we look out for each other and really care about each other, prospering and thriving as we build with those around us.
But in the midst of this effort so many others seek to have dominance over those around them, destroying and stealing the peace of others as if that makes them stronger and smarter. But in doing so, they bring about their own eventual destruction through the incredible lack of comprehension they demonstrate in the hopeless reality of despair they have created for themselves. They are spending their lives trying to crawl out of a hole they keep digging for themselves over the backs of the very people that could help them out. It's perpetual misery at it's worse.
Take God out of your life and something else will fill the void, a person much wiser than myself once said. And that something else is most certainly not going to be good.
So I put my efforts each day into filling my existence with what will give to those around me what I actually desperately need for myself. And the odd thing is, when I do that, what I need comes back to me - somehow, sooner or later, but it does come. It would no doubt work far better and faster if I was more apt at it, but I'm still a work in progress - as those around me are only too well aware.
I remember during a time in my life when I was homeless, and hungry. Work was hard to find, and even day work hard to get. I was along a river watching pumpkins float by that fall season, wondering who would allow so much good food to drift out to sea. I remember aching just to be able to have one of those pumpkins for a meal, drifting past so far out of my reach.
It was about then I noticed one starting to actually cut across the current of the river towards me, until it had drifted into a small lagoon on my side of the river. It was still far out of my reach, but I hopefully approached the bank, looking for anything I could use to reach out over the considerable expanse, just to touch it and try...just try...but there was nothing on that field or bank around me I could use.
Then the pumpkin started to spin, and in an amazing display of accuracy cut directly across the lagoon, straight for me, until it had touched against the shore in front of me.
And stopped.
I carefully reached down and picked the gift up, in tears to our God that hears even the quiet whispering of our hearts.
So was it manly to show such emotions in my hour of need? Fortunately, I learned from the good man in my Father that there are times when you do, because a man shows his greatest strength in self control, and his intelligence in the kindness of good and useful service to others. This isn't a feminist side - this is part of the protecting strength that should be found in every man.
His friends, ranking high on the list a WW II Veteran Bob Hoedel, also taught me that even the worst of war can be overcome through consistent honest work and the art of culture - in his case, music.
He hit the beaches of Normandy that June at the height of the war in Europe, and was fighting at the point of the spear against the worst Hitler could throw at them.
What made it especially difficult for him was his German heritage - his family was from Germany, migrating to America after WW I. They spoke German still while growing up in Alaska on the homestead, which is where I met and grew up with them and their children. So he fought and acted as an interpreter as they advanced, struggling with combat in the land and against the people he loved as his home.
But it wasn't until he reached the concentration camps where he saw the what was being done to the Jews that he truly understood how Hitler had so cruelly distorted the vision of his people and their nation, bringing about their eventual destruction. "It was the only time in my life, Bill," he told me, "that I was ever ashamed to be German." A good man caught in the grinder of war, and who spent the rest of his life afterward determined to leave as much good behind him as he could.
God bless you, Bob - you succeeded. Especially in the gifts you gave us children.
And now as a Veteran myself, and knowing from my own family history that I, too, come from a German heritage, I feel the pain he must have felt for his people and their nation. I have learned in my time there so many years later, walking up to the silent concrete bunkers now hidden in small groups of trees amidst the fields and the hillsides, that these, too, were people caught in a machine of another's ambitions until it tore them apart - good families with loving husbands and wives, children playing in their villages and celebrating the joys of life, caught up in the vain empty promises of those only determined to satisfy their drive for power on the backs of those they should have served.
Such is history.
So as time continues, good people continue to try to keep faith alive by living it. We find our ways to confront the dilemma that conflicting emotions create, and take each day as best we can, one at a time.
For me, that stabilizing influence comes from God, my loving Wife, and a big white dog who insists that getting up together by 0400 hrs. each morning is worth it.
And so far, he's been right.
