Ever find it hard to see anything beautiful during a dark time? I’ve struggled with that since the sudden, unexplained death of our six-year-old granddaughter this year - nothing but pain and sadness. So I’ve held onto a story I learned about Robert, a father scrambling to provide for his family early in the Twentieth Century. He’d attempted various jobs that produced nothing but poverty. At Christmas he tried earning money at a fair to buy presents, but failed. On his way home to his farmhouse late that night, he stopped his horse by the woods. With miles to go before he slept, he could freeze under a blanket of snow on this darkest night of the year.     
     Seventeen years later. Robert Frost stepped outside his stone farmhouse into a radiant sunrise in the lightest time of the year. His mind traveled back to that bleak night. But now, Frost recalled the brush of easy wind and downy flake - beauty!     
     He hurried inside to his dining room table, and in twenty minutes penned “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening.” It’s perhaps the most famous poem of the Twentieth Century, calling us to search for loveliness in our darkness.     
     We all face bitter-cold journeys in life. I’m thinking that, as Frost discovered, I won’t find beauty in my circumstances, but instead in my setting. It’s in the hug of a friend. Or a meal dropped off to sustain us. Or the quiet look from someone who understands. That’s beauty in darkness.     
​     Frost’s poem is here.

     Trust me, like lilies bursting through murky waters to bloom in the sunshine, strength can blossom out of weakness.     
     Take, for instance, the life of Claude Monet. After cataracts nearly blinded him and he could no longer discern color, the French impressionist painter created some of his best loved works. He yearned to capture his waterlily ponds on canvas, but they appeared gray to him. Therefore, Monet relied on the labels on his paint tubes to know which to spread onto his palette. Through his perseverance, the artist’s shimmering pond paintings reflect not only the sky, they reflect a man who believed vivid beauty existed even when he could no longer see it.     
     Like Monet, I’ve been plagued with vision problems - near and far sightedness that forced me into lenses as thick as Coke bottles, astigmatism that distorted images, cataracts that threatened to turn everything dark. Surgeries improved my sight, but left it changing throughout the day - something not always easy to live with.     
     Yet my delight in nature grew out of this weakness. I remember when I put on my first pair of glasses and peered at tree bark. Shocking - how intricate! Years later, I still love photographing the world’s complexity, something I appreciate because it was once only a blur.      
     So what’s your weakness? Has it developed a strength in you? Don’t let that weakness overcome you. Search for the backbone of character and strength it develops in you.    
​     Because nothing in this life has to be wasted. Not even handicaps.

     First Tony’s parents divorced, then his mother underwent shock therapy. He begged his mom to set aside part of her alimony money for food, but she burned it up in cigarettes.
     Our friend Tony decided that if he was going to make it, “I had to make it on my own.” So he left home at thirteen and moved in with older guys. That dropped him into a culture of pot and alcohol.
     Yet he persisted in school, attending classes during the day and working at a Chinese restaurant at night (“I was the only white guy there.”). He graduated, married, had three kids, attended college, and joined the energy industry. Fast forward: Tony’s wife left, and he finished raising their youngest child. He remarried, welcoming his new wife’s family. Meanwhile, his expanding career moved him around fifteen countries on five continents.
    Then the bottom fell out, and Tony learned he couldn’t make it on his own. Work-related social drinking had drowned him. His greatest accomplishment occurred then when he “turned it all over to The Man, Jesus Christ,” he says. “There’s got to be a word above gratefulness to describe what I feel.”
     So how did Tony survive the odds stacked against him? As he told us about his life, I observed he never blamed others. He took responsibility. And he realized he couldn’t make it on his own.
​     That’s a wise man.

    Tony joked it was okay to tell his story
“as long as it includes that I love my God,
​rock and roll, and all people.”

     Born with a genetic disorder, Melody was “incompatible with life,” tight-lipped doctors told her parents. She may not survive for a week.
     But Melody did, and at twenty days old, doctors sent her home with hospice care, not expecting her to live much longer. At five weeks, she languished near death. Her parents picked out a burial plot. But Melody rallied and made it to a year. Then another. And another. And another.
     When Melody turned five recently, friends decorated a gymnasium with balloons, covered tables with cloths, and threw a fajita party. Two hundred thirty turned out to celebrate the girl who lived.
     Melody zipped around the gym in her pink Porsche, then a chorus of children sang “In My Heart There Rings a Melody.” And I couldn’t hold back my tears.
     She giggles now with big smiles that melt hearts. She signs to communicate. She’s written up in the book “Miracles We Have Seen: American’s Leading Physicians Share Stories They Can’t Forget.”
     Melody has required much care from family, friends, and medical experts. But what has she given back? “I’ve observed over and over,” her mother says, “Melody brings out the best in us.”
     Perhaps that’s her calling. Her weakness makes us all stronger and better. With Melody, we find our harmony.
     She’s God’s little surprise, and in my heart I’ve been singing a Melody ever since I met her.

     Please share this post. More of Melody’s story is at www.melodysstory.com.

     She was one of those ’60s people Joni Mitchell sang about, a child of God walking along a road that led to Woodstock. Seeds of goodwill from attending that music festival planted in Barbara Moore’s soul.
     But they lay dormant for years, squelched by life in the corporate fast lane. Then Barbara asked herself what she really wanted. “To get back to the garden.”
     She learned that more than 200,000 children struggle with hunger every day in Colorado. Some receive free or reduced-cost school lunches. But on weekends, they may go hungry. In one family, the kids play a guessing game: “Who’s going to get to eat this weekend?”
     Barbara went into action, and Jeffco Eats was born. Volunteers bag food items and transport them to schools for students to carry home for the weekend.
     Meeting needs doesn’t have to come through an organization. One woman I know watches out for latchkey kids on her block, helping them with loose bike chains. A grandfather runs errands for his daughter so she doesn’t have to haul her preschoolers around. A group of women knit hats for homeless teens.
     The world’s needs can overwhelm me. But I heard a man say, “Sometimes the most spiritual thing you can do is to stop praying only and to start doing.”
     Good advice. So I’m part of Barbara’s brigade, filling bags with meals for hungry tummies. We’re transforming the idealism of Woodstock into the reality of foodstock.
     Because nobody should be forced to guess who gets to eat this weekend.