Let's Be Diggers and Shakers

Mary Cassatt, Children At the Seashore

 by Anne White

"When I was young I told a tale of buried gold, and men from leagues around dug in the woods.  I dug myself."
"But why?"
"I thought the tale of treasure might be true"
"You said you made it up."
"I know I did, but then I didn't know I had." (The 13 Clocks, by James Thurber)

"I was playing the part of a good wife and mother quite successfully in the outward ways but that, I saw now, was not enough. That was not love. Creative love meant building up by quantities of small actions a habit of service that might become at last a habit of mind and feeling as well as of body. I tried, and I found it did work out like that.'" (Elizabeth Goudge, The Bird in the Tree)

Is it better to dig for gems that might be only a tale, and somehow profit by the act of digging; or to hold back because they might no longer be there, or might never have existed at all? Lucilla, in The Bird in the Tree, had dreamed of a fairy-tale love, but found that what she was looking for could only be found by putting her shovel to the ground, even if that ground was unyielding and had to be dug a tiny bit at a time.

But the duty of praise is not for occasional or rare seasons; it waits at our doors every day. (Charlotte Mason, Ourselves Book II)

Is it an act of faith to give our children picks and shovels, and ask them to do this thing with us? Yes, and more than that, it is badly needed.

"We're going to meet a lot of lonely people in the next week and the next month and the next year and when they ask us what we're doing, you can say, We're remembering. That's where we'll win out in the long run...When the war's over, perhaps we can be of some use in the world." (Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451) 

What will you do this week to love creatively?

What will you do to remember?