Category: Inspiration - trish hermanson

My Hero Is a Loser

7/19/2019

My hero is a loser.
     Every way he tried to find happiness and purpose failed. A broken marriage. A broken career. Broken political dreams. A broken reputation. And broken health, leaving this once handsome man bent and blind.
     He thought he could create paradise on Earth, but everything let him down one way or another.
Isn't that how life is? We put our hope in a social movement; it falls short. Or in politicians; they break promises. Or a business venture; it takes more than it gives. Or in love and friendship; people hurt us. Or we knock ourselves out at work, and no one fully appreciates our sacrifice.
     Futility dogs us. Even my carefully tended landscaping sprouts weeds.
     The best in life eventually leaves us aching for more.
     Author C.S. Lewis explains this discontent: “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” Only in that other realm, God’s paradise, will everything be whole. Perfect. Complete.
     That’s why John Milton is my hero. When this Seventeenth Century writer grasped that nothing would completely satisfy, he wrote “Paradise Lost.” It landed in the trashcan of obscurity.
     Not until after his death did critics recognize it as the greatest English epic poem ever crafted. But such praise wouldn’t have mattered to Milton anymore. He’d already graduated to the land of absolute fulfillment.
  Which leaves me wondering whether I’m searching for utopia here, or there.

How General Jackson Helps 'Conduct' My Ways

7/12/2019

Who would guess that what I’m learning in choir would help to set a course for my life?
     But that’s what occurs through my choral director, a spry woman of eighty-nine sometimes called General Jackson. Jo Ann warns that singing is boring if we punch out every word at the same volume. The gentle general says we need dynamics, variations between a whisper and a crescendo.
     Through her graciousness in teaching music, Jo Ann demonstrates that even though I can’t orchestrate life completely, I can sometimes pick up the baton and direct the music of my days. If I constantly throw myself into a frenzied forte, I exhaust myself. I need times of pianissimo - quiet.
     Just as notes are organized into measures, I can arrange my activities so I’m not overwhelmed - schedule.
     I can pay attention to the tempo and declare when I need a rest note - a break.
     And I can give myself grace notes, those unnecessary flourishes that add richness - chocolate?
     So how am I “conducting” my days and my energy? Am I creating a symphony with this God-given treasure of time?
     Every life is worth it.

How to Fall Forward Like My Friend Victoria

6/7/2019

My friend Victoria showed me that when we fall, whether from our failures or things others inflict upon us, we don’t have to fall back. We can fall forward.
     Even through tough times, Victoria’s stock response was “it could be worse.” And she endured tough times: hiding under the kitchen table when Nazi bombs rained upon England during World War II, a hardscrabble upbringing in Liverpool, the death of a husband, raising kids on her own, a foreclosure, and a brain injury when a truck hit her.
  Her attitude that life is an adventure kept her moving forward as she threw herself into various careers. Some brought in bread, some busted. At one point, Victoria was so broke she lived off of canned tuna and “gutter apples” she scrounged. But she heeded the words of her hero Winston Churchill to “never give up.”
     When her hip went bad, she moved in with us, crawling up the stairs until she regained her health. Yet when I was down about something, she’d brew a cup of proper tea, remind me “you gotta laugh,” and regale me with stories.
     In recent years she’d gone from surviving to thriving through her blog, Honey for Your Soul. Hundreds responded to her life-giving encouragement. Her final tweet: “Never quit! Keep asking, seeking, knocking!”
     Then a heart attack. The finish line. And this time when she fell, she landed in the arms of Jesus.
     The best fall forward. Ever.

Painting by Kerolos Safwat

Can I Get a Bit of Leonardo daVinci's Genius?

5/30/2019

Can I get a bit of Leonardo da Vinci’s genius?
     The guy was centuries ahead of his time with his inventions of flying machines, submarines, scuba suits, machine guns, and military tanks. And his paintings are a standard by which art is still evaluated. Could I have just a part of his brain?
     I can! We all can!
     At an exhibit commemorating the five hundredth anniversary of Leonardo’s death, I learned we can gain a piece of his brilliance by practicing unquenchable curiosity.
     “Leonardo may have been the person with the greatest amount of curiosity of any human who ever existed,” biographer Walter Isaacson says. In Leonardo’s notebooks we discover the Fifteenth Century Renaissance man is wondering what the tongue of the woodpecker looks like, how people can walk on ice, and why the sky is blue. He’s like a two-year-old, raising questions nonstop - a trait we sadly outgrow.
     But Leonardo never did.
     Researchers say that only one-fourth of one percent of people are geniuses. Yet any of us can increase our knowledge by asking who, what, where, when, why, and how.
     We may not master the mysteries of the universe, but we’ll be filled with an awesome wonder of it.
  All by asking questions.

What Happened to the Boy in the Window?

4/19/2019

This week our Columbine community gathered to remember the massacre twenty years ago at our local high school where two students killed thirteen and injured twenty-four. I recalled our shock at that time as we wondered, “How can these traumatized students go forward in life?”
     Take, for instance, Patrick Ireland, “the boy in the window.” He’d been shot twice in the head and once in the foot and lay bleeding to death for nearly three hours. With one side paralyzed, he crawled across the floor and hoisted himself to a broken window. He dangled precariously from the second floor until officers grabbed his falling body and rushed him to surgery. Doctors removed the bullet in his forehead, but couldn’t touch one deep in his brain that he still carries today.
     The prognosis? Patrick might never walk or talk again.
     But at our memorial service, “the boy in the window” rose to speak. Through seven months of therapy, Patrick had learned to read, write, walk, and talk. He graduated from Columbine as valedictorian, then graduated from college magna cum laude with a 3.9 GPA.
     Patrick says a major factor in his recovery was choosing “to be a victor instead of a victim.” Also, he learned “there’s tremendous power in forgiveness, while unforgiveness is a silent killer. Forgiveness is hard, painful, a process,” he says, and the key is “to stop focusing on what others have done to us and to focus on what Jesus has done for us.”
  I left the community gathering pondering that no matter what trials any of us face, Patrick’s attitude can propel us forward. We can determine to be victors and to forgive.

Patrick Ireland learned to walk, talk, read, and write again.
(Both photos screen shots)

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