View By The Lake (Chapel A Day 2013: Day 5)
I love sitting in a church, chapel, or cathedral. I love admiring the architecture, whether simple or elaborate. I love the kneeling benches, altars and pipe organs. I love the stained-glass windows, the candles, and all of the traditions and rituals that are a part of that particular building.
But, I understand that God is not limited to the walls that make up those buildings.
And, so sometimes my ‘chapel’ is found in a place like this.
Day 5 of my 40 day journey into Lent found me opting out of a bricks & sticks chapel, and headed to this open-air chapel of my own making. This is a quiet little lake I happened upon some time ago in a rural area of Northwest Florida. It’s become a favorite spot of mine. It is a peaceful, beautiful, and a vivid reminder that “In the beginning, God created…”
Day 5’s hour of time challenged me to examine what it is that I have created… and am creating… that will have lasting value after my time on Earth is done. For years, I wrote daily news stories for the morning and evening newscasts. I venture to say that only a fraction of those stories are still remembered by anyone today—including me! (Except for the bloopers. Trust me. They last forever.) The houses I decorated, meals I cooked, errands I ran—while all important at the time—are by and large part of the past. They came, they went, they are forgotten.
I pray that what will last into the future are the seeds of compassion, love, family, integrity, ethics, responsibility and hard work that I have sown in my beautiful children. I pray that at least some of what God has given me to say in speeches, books, and even this blog will touch a life here and there and cause something to take place in that person that will impact the future—either theirs or someone else’s. I pray that I will become more selective in the way I spend my time and will be more desiring to spend that time creating something good—something lasting—something that will touch others in a positive way, well into the future.
Why don’t you join me? We will probably have to go outside the walls we are used to—whether they are walls we’ve constructed, or those that others have put around us. But, guess what? It could be that—’outside the walls’ is where the creative process begins.