Reflections of One Small Candle

By Gertie Mayeux

LIT CANDLES

We keep candles in our homes in case of power failures, for prayer or to create a cozy atmosphere or simply for their beauty. Their real purpose is and has always been to dispel darkness and in doing so bring comfort and reassurance to us in physical darkness. We are all familiar with the Christophers motto. It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.
In South Africa before apartheid was abolished, people would light a candle and place it in a window as a sign of hope, that one day this evil would be overcome. It soon was declared illegal, as illegal as carrying a gun. The village children would laugh and say, The government is afraid of candles. Things did get better for them as a people with the end of apartheid after the long years of darkness.
It is an appalling sense of darkness we encounter whenever there is a diagnosis of illness that completely re-directs our lives and wipes out our plans for our lives as well as our future. If ever there is a time in our lives we need this darkness dispelled it is in this bewildering place. So many of us have given up our loved ones to cancer, but there is a candle lit and it was lit by a doctor at a cancer facility and there is light in his words:

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Sep 18, 2012
• ISBN: 9781477240403

Gertie Mayeux

Gertie Pratt Mayeux; {b.} January 20, l932, St. Landry, Louisiana; {m.} Paul N. Mayeux {deceased}, November 12, 1949; {ch.} Six sons and six daughters; {ed.} O.L.O.L. School of Nursing, Loyola Graduate Studies, McKnight School Of Art; {occ.} Mother, Artist and Retired Teacher of Art and Religion; {pers.} “Words from the heart to the heart deeply move. We must be always aware of this power within us and use it well”; {a.} Ville Platte, LA.

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WHAT IF

This two word question is powerful. Powerful enough to start us up or shut us down to new possibilities. Short and effective as a key, it locks and unlocks. Human behavior seems to indicate the presence of two doors to our deepest center, one positive and one negative. Remembering a song of long ago, the words went something like this; accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative and don’t mess with Mr. In-between. These modes show up in our behavior regularly, but what if?

What if? I decide there is no other quite like me. Rare and precious are those who love me and our God who called me into being in this my moment in time.

What if? I decide, deep within, I have a message to be uniquely spoken only by me.

What if? I decide there is a song to be sung with lyrics and melody only I can hear.

What if? I decide there is an act of love only I can bestow in a certain moment to a certain person.

What if? I decide my life is a gift and how I live is a gift to those who have made it possible.

What if? I decide to take full responsibility for the things I have done and failed to do.

What if? I decide to stop complaining about what is not happening and focus on counting the many good things that are happening, however small.

What if? I decide to wake each morning, aware this might be my last day and live it as such.

What if? I decide each person in my day is important and of great value to someone.

What if? I decide I can’t change the whole world, but I can change my world, the small area of my life.

What if? I decide I am here for a purpose, even though I don’t always understand why.

Life; in its very essence, is life-giving, and life gives each of us each day, opportunities to enrich our own lives and that of others by accentuating the positive. There is no in between. We can change our world and we must, one decision at a time. We have the key.

September, 2004.

FROM c to SHINING C’s

To touch the smallest flower is to disturb the far star. A Canadian poet touched a resounding chord deep within when he expressed in words the connectedness in all things. Carl Sagan, in his P.B.S. series said, All we have to do is stand under a night sky and know we are star stuff.

The worrisome question in this is, how have we become so disconnected from our environment and in a large degree from one another? What is it that keeps us from walking with bare feet in the grass, dancing in the rain with our mouth open, feeling the squish of mud between our toes, the wind in our hair, from seeing the sparkling colors in a dewdrop when the sun lights it up, the wonder of capturing a dewdrop on a blade of grass, not to be found in tomorrow? What is it that has robbed us of our ability to stand in awe, to be captured and lifted up in and by a moment in time? Have we been captured in comfort?

We are each one of us, capable of all these things as children. We can re-discover it in children if we are blessed by their presence. They teach us how to free our spirits and it is this child-likeness God wants of each of us. When we can hear, as well as see laughter dancing in a child’s eyes, we begin to understand awesome is not just a word but can be a state of being.

Today’s state of being is geared toward comfort. This is reflected in all areas of life in ways that we think and act. We work ourselves to death making a living so we can be comfortable only to discover later on we have failed to make a life. This little c, without warning, stagnates our lives and robs it of meaning. We become internally inert and this inertia affects our health, our relationships and our environment. Everything gets easier not to do. We become disconnected from life as it is and never discover what it might be, often leading to boredom and depression. Our life-giving mode is short-circuited. There is no longer a river of life flowing out of us to others and to our world. We find ourselves avoiding commitment in all its forms. After all, what can the little we could do make any difference at all? If we have ever been in bed with a mosquito, we know this is not true. Little things do make a big difference.

Tragedies, or close encounters with death, our own or someone we love, are always wake up calls to life. These great nudges or shoves life deals us are allowed to move us toward the big C of commitment. To step out of our self-centered comfort zones toward others and re-discover the awesome wellspring of life deep within us, connecting us to each other and all things. The courage required to move from c to the shining C of commitment enables us to live each moment present to ourselves and to one another. We become Connected. We are no longer marking time from one event to another. We begin to live more in one day than we did in ten years.

The Glory of God is, man fully alive, St Ireanaus.

October, 2004.

WHEN an OATH is NOT an OATH

An oath is a solemn attestation of truth or inviolability of one’s words. It is the first principle on which the laws of our nation stand firmly. An oath is required of every individual elected or appointed to positions of great responsibility and required of each of us who testify in court. Raising our right hand and attesting to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God, is protected by the penalty of perjury.

An oath is not an oath when it violates its own truth, its vital or first principle. What is truth, one might ask. Truth, according to Webster dictionary, is reality. Reality is fact and fact is that which is.

To violate truth, that which is, is to erode all existing foundations in society, whether it is families or governments.

The beginning of life is life, whether it is two cells or two million. It is fact, that which is. It is truth. This life in progress is not limited to gestation but is the ongoing development of a human life until death. This life did not become life when the umbilical cord is cut; it has always been a life with its own D.N.A. Its very existence from the beginning depended on the woman’s body making the necessary changes to insure this new life would not be rejected by her own body. This life, with its own D.N.A. is not an appendage of a woman’s body, but a new unique human being and is guaranteed protection under our Constitution.

Our Supreme Court made up of nine judges protects our Constitution. All of whom are sworn in under oath. They are sworn in to protect me in my beginning and now, Failure to do this is to violate their own oaths and my constitutional rights. Violating their oaths by defending the Roe vs. Wade decision authenticates the violation of the Hippocratic Oath, which is also protected by the penalty of malpractice. Doctors are allowed by this decision, which is now the law of the land, to destroy the beginnings of a new life, a new human person, by labeling it as a by-product of pregnancy, tissue to be discarded. This theory of less than human, we now know as the holocaust of World War II.

When our highest court violates the first vital principle on which our nation is built, the protection of individual rights under our Constitution, it contradicts its very self. To declare an unborn child a legal heir yet allow doctors to destroy it is a horrendous contradiction.

A trickle down erosion of our judicial system can no longer protect and safeguard our Constitution. When an oath is not an oath, the foundations of our great nation crumble stone by stone and we are no longer guaranteed life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

My concern is great and deeply troubling. I need to know if your oath is an oath. I need to know if it is possible for my small voice to be heard by you in this our great land.

November, 2004.

CHRISTMAS CHOICES

The woman at the register was checking out a shopper. I could see and hear in her voice she was very tired. When asked about her upcoming plans for Christmas, she replied. I can’t wait until this is all over. I’ve spent too much money and now I will have to work twice as hard next year to pay for everything. The tremendous burden she placed upon herself, or was placed on her by expectations of others, totally eclipsed the great gift Christmas was meant to be for her.

Sometimes, no, often times we need to back up or climb up higher to get a better view of what we are all about and how we move into and out of this special season.

We date everything, or most everything, because time and what we do in time is important. How is it we do not realize we are proclaiming this great event, God’s personal intervention into our human experience each time we record today’s date?

A phenomenon happens each year at this time. It is the time in the busy world in which we live, we pause in our thoughts and actions and literally start planning ideas on how to make one another happy. The world at large is affected by this, Christians as well as non-Christians. It is a tiny glimpse of what love, peace and joy might continue to be for us in the upcoming year.

Complete strangers greet each other full of good will wishes. Eyes of children sparkle with the light of life, full of awe and wonder as did our Christ child on his first day of his human experience. There is genuineness in our human experience bursting through in our bruised and bleeding pretentious world and we need to be aware and tuned into it. This is our once a year wakeup to the wonder and awe of being alive, fully alive.

Our God came to us in littleness. It was the surest way into our arms and hearts, coming as a baby. If HE was willing to downsize to fit into our hearts, can we not downsize all areas of our lives enough to allow ourselves to be touched by the Holy?

To enter this season eagerly and in awe of what God has done for us is to allow ourselves to be touched by the Holy. To wear ourselves out in exhaustion in holiday mode leaves us scratched by the holly of it all. Touched by the Holy or scratched by the holly is our Christmas choice.

December, 2004.

HUNGER for HIGH PLACES

On the forest floor near the base of a tall tree, a young Indian boy found an egg. He picked it up and placed it in a prairie chicken nest. When the eggs hatched, the prairie chicken got busy teaching her young to scratch the soil to find seeds and bugs. This went on all day every day. The chicks grew and one day while scratching for food, one chick looked up and soaring high above was a magnificent bird. The chick was amazed at what he saw and there was a terrible ache down deep inside of him. How he wished he could do something so wonderful. Mother hen clucked loudly and he lowered his head and continued scratching the soil and never discovered the eagle he was. Born to soar, he spent his life scratching the soil believing he was a prairie chicken.

There is this same terrible ache or hunger for high places in each of us. There has to be more to life than I can see is a recurring, nagging thought, which settles in on us on a regular basis. Does it lead us out of where we are or does it cause us to scratch harder for