Category: Inspiration - trish hermanson

What Ruby Bridged Taught Me about Hatred

8/13/2020

     I gasped at the destruction at our city center as I walked toward the Denver Art Museum. Statues defaced by protesters, buildings graffitied.
     But when I entered the museum, it wasn’t my Covid mask that left me breathless. It was this Norman Rockwell painting capturing a six-year-old desegregating a school in New Orleans in 1960. Day after day Ruby Bridges entered the school to the taunts of protesters who screamed they wanted to poison her. One morning before Ruby entered, she paused, and her lips moved. When she went inside, her teacher asked, “What were you saying?”
     “I was praying for the people in the street,” Ruby said. “I pray for them every morning and every afternoon when I go home.” She usually prayed from several blocks away, but that day she forgot. So she stopped at the school steps, turned toward the rioters, and asked God to be good to them and forgive them “because they don’t know what they’re doing.”
     These days we often feel that others don’t know what they’re doing. Of course “our side” is right. It’s the “other side” that’s lunatic.
  But I’m weary of the hatred, including from myself. It’s poisonous. I think it’s time I pray like Ruby that God will be good to those I disagree with. I ought to pray for “my side,” too, because it doesn’t always know what it’s doing.
     Maybe, just maybe, I’ll discover I have something in common with someone from the “other side,” as Cosy Sheridan sings about in this song.

How Gertie Has Spent Her 108 Years

8/4/2020

Gertie Abkes of Denver turned 108 today and hoped to get 108 cards as a gift. She was born four months after the Titanic sank and has survived two pandemics. During her lifetime, the world has moved from model T’s to Mars rovers, and I asked her what she thought about all the changes.
     “It’s just lifestyle changes,” she told me matter-of-factly over the phone.
     “So what’s the secret of your many years?”
     She chuckled. “I guess God knows what he wants to do with me, and I follow His path. But I’m just an ordinary person.”
     Gertie worked as a nurse. She and Leonard had no children, and were married for six-two years until he died of cancer. She hated to give up her Buick when she quit driving at 100. She watches baseball on Saturdays (she told me the scores ), keeps her apartment clean, and wonders what Trump will do. Ordinary things.
     Gertie reminds me of how unspectacular most of our lives are. Every day we put one foot in front of the other, and all the while God knows what he wants to do with us. For those who follow God’s path like Gertie, Henry Martyn says, “If (God) has work for me to do, I cannot die.” John Piper agrees: “I am immortal until my work is done.”
     So even in my many unspectacular days, my life matters, just as Gertie’s does. That comforts me.
     As for Gertie, word got out about her birthday, and she has received more than 400 cards.
     ***
     Photo: Clermont Park.

My 96-Year-Old Personal Trainer S-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-s Me

1/16/2020

Meet Morrie, my “personal trainer,” who just turned ninety-six and stretches me in all sorts of ways.
     I got to know Morrie when I saw him stretch his leg over a handrail at the gym and realized he’s more flexible than I am. When I complimented him, he showed me his routine and laughed. “Keep at it, and in a few decades you’ll be like me.”
     That was encouraging because I sometimes feel that I’ve already lived beyond my expiration date. But at the rec center I watch Morrie move from machine to machine, waving a hello to all the folks as he smiles and hums Tommy Dorsey tunes. His sunny attitude challenges me that whether I have a short game or a long game left to play in life, it's best to embrace every day with a smile on my face and a song in my heart.
     Because every day is a gift.

My Miracle Friend Jerry

9/13/2019

If my friend Jerry had been been born with Down Syndrome a century ago, his life expectancy would have been ten, but instead, a group of us recently celebrated his fifty-second birthday by slicing into his favorite cake, chocolate-cherry.
     Instead of a sheltered life, Jerry’s a rock star wherever he goes. At the rec center, he wears his Incredible Hulk t-shirt that says “I’m Kind of a Big Deal,” and he fist bumps others as he cycles under the instruction of his personal trainer. He keeps his own apartment with the help of a personal assistant to nag him about housekeeping, and he worked for nearly a quarter century at a supermarket until he retired.
     As I observe Jerry’s full life, my heart breaks that most parents who discover prenatally that their child has Down Syndrome still choose to abort. They do so because of “misinformation of the ancient past,” says Dr. Roger Ladda of the Milton S. Hershey Medical Center. They don’t understand that “survivability and quality of life has been transfigured.”
  So at his party as I watched Jerry read aloud the well wishes in his stack of cards, I was filled with gratitude to know this super hero who really is a big deal. He’s turned his malady into “Up Syndrome,” and reminds me that often I understand the most from those considered the least in this world.

Donna's Surprising Takeaway from a 2,200-Mile Trek

8/8/2019

Donna Nedde trekked five million steps and 2,200 miles and came away with a message that surprised me.
     She and her husband Tom Kinsella took five months conquering the Appalachian Trail from Maine to Georgia, a journey through fourteen states. This is like scaling Mt. Everest sixteen times.
   Donna, whom I met at the rec center, burned through three pairs of hiking boots and lost fifteen pounds, typical for hikers who consume five thousand calories daily just to maintain their weight on this expedition. When they arrived in a town every week or so, “I could personally eat a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia,” Donna says.
     And what is her amazing take away?
     “How little we need to live.”
     They carried backpacks, a tent, stove, freeze-dried food, breakfast bars, granola, a water purifier, shorts and a shirt, long pants, phones they rarely turned on, a camera, a shovel and toilet paper, Tom’s Native American flute, “and my Kindle for reading at night,” Donna says.
     That’s it.
     What a contrast from what I observe around me - houses built smaller while storage lockers spring up. Catherine Alles from the Foundation for Economic Education reports that the average American home has 300,000 items. One out of four houses with two-car garages can’t fit a car in them because of all the stuff, she says.
     So Donna’s surprising message is not how to survive, but how to truly live: simply.
     Maybe that’s what we need to survive, too.
     And maybe it’s time to clean out my closets.