Back in 1981 Joel Garreau wrote a book called The Nine Nations of North America – he called the area we live in, around the Rocky Mountains, “The Empty Quarter” (this is a nod to Saudi Arabia’s Rub’ al Khali – a desert space of Saudi Arabia) – referencing the kind of wild and independent spirit in this part of the west.
I’d like to think we are a wild and independent spirit church (I love the image of the Holy Spirit in the UK – a wild goose!). Last week I was meeting with the Illuminators: Nesti and Travis. Nesti told me about a woman she had met living in a shelter here, fleeing an abusive home in Nevada. She recounted the many problems in this woman’s life.
Then she paused and said, “but that’s not the whole story.”
“This woman is an empath.”
“What do you mean,” I ask.
Nesti says, “Well at the shelter you can find yourself around people sometimes getting frustrated and angry.”
I said, “you can run across that anywhere.”
Nesti laughed.
She went on, “When this woman notices someone getting ready to boil over… She walks over to them and asks if she can put a hand on the person’s arm or shoulder.
And when she does it the person calms down.”
C’mon!
Is there not a place in this society for someone with this skill set?
In the classroom, in a business office, heck, at the city council!
This woman – she is a healer.
So, how will we support the healer?
Stories like these hold the important meaningful, spiritual questions of our lives in this world.
How will we support the healers, the artists, the teachers, the gifted all around us? How do we do it for people we already know (and love)? How do we do this for our children, our friends? And then the question, the biblical question: How do we do this for the stranger?
In a way it’s also the question of how do we move from strangers to friend?
I’ll leave it here. In the Empty Quarter.
By the way, I recently received a note from the Mayor of Bloomington, Indiana (a University City, not unlike ours). She wants to come out here and bring some people from Bloomington to learn from what we are learning here from the Illuminators! Your light is shining brightly even across the country!
Keep tellin’ the Story,
Mike
I hope you will enjoy this “joke song” by the Lake Street Dive and Lawrence from a theme they called “Joyful Rebellion” – the song is “Help is on the Way.”
This week’s takeaway: Even in places (and people) thought of as empty, there is power (wild and imaginative and free)!
Photo by Rich Saxon