Just some early morning thoughts from me to you…
“Too much sanity may be madness and the maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.”
Miguel de Cervantes
It’s a feeling that enters more than my thoughts as I wake most mornings. It seems to come from something deeper within me. A feeling that always seems to be intensified as I wander through God’s early morning creation to retrieve the morning paper.
This morning the feeling took on the form of words from a line I heard yesterday during a worship service: “Sense the possibility of this world.”
I suppose that on occasion we’ve all had that feeling wander across our perspective of tomorrow. When all the dreams we have for our lives and the lives of others we love seem within our reach. When all the dreams we have for peace throughout our nation and world, that will be our legacy to hand to our children and grandchildren, seem but a handshake away.
Yet I suspect that it doesn’t stay there as long as we’d like it to in the midst of all that we face every day. Or perhaps it’s too hard at times to see the possibility of the world we dream of in the midst of the evening news broadcasts, or illnesses impacting loved ones in your home, or with the loss of an opportunity you hoped would become a reality.
Yet for the rest of our lives, a sense of longing for all the possibility of our lives and world will continue to interrupt your days and mine and cause us to look beyond where we are to where we dream to be.
It’s the way God intended it to be.
He placed within each of us the dreams and desire to reach for the stars, to become all He created us to be, to see the possibilities which He sees in you and in me and in all the world. The God Who created us placed within us the seeds to see life not as it is, but as it should be—as He created it to be—for you and for me and for all the world.
As the hero of the musical “Man of La Mancha”, Don Quixote was thought to be a bit mad, insane, as he followed his “quest” with his faithful sidekick Sancho Panza by his side, crusading against injustice, hopelessness, sorrow and other foes he saw that held people down from becoming all they should be. Depicting scenes emanating from the Spanish Inquisition of the 1500’s, Cervantes created a character for the ages—Don Quixote—who, sensing the possibilities of the world in the destiny of his own mind, marches forth to right the wrongs of the world he meets along his journey.
Whether tilting at windmills, thinking them to be giants, or trying to turn peasant street walkers into “fair ladies”, especially one whom he is taken with named Aldonza, whom he renames Dulcinea, he marches on undaunted.
Don Quixote’s story is ours—the story of the journey of human faith and survival, of innocence and courage seeing in the midst of all the rubble of our days—all the possibilities of the future.
And at one poignant moment when Don Quixote is challenged by Dulcinea about “what is this ‘Quest’ anyway”, he sings this classic to explain why he is doing what he is doing:
To dream the impossible dream…
To fight the unbeatable foe…
To bear with unbearable sorrow…
To run where the brave dare not go…
To right the unrightable wrong….
To love pure and chaste from afar…
To try when your arms are too weary…
To reach the unreachable star…
This is my quest…to follow that star…
No matter how hopeless…no matter how far…
To fight for the right without question or pause…
To be willing to march into hell for a heavenly cause.
And I know if I’ll only be true to this glorious quest…
That my heart will lie peaceful and calm when I’m laid to my rest.
And the world will be better for this…
That one man scorned and covered with scars…
Still strove with his last ounce of courage…
To reach the unreachable star.
(Mitch Leigh/Joe Darion)
To always see life as it is and not as it should be may be madness as Cervantes notes in the opening quote. It is clearly not what God intended for our lives when He created us. To sense the possibility of this world, to dream the impossible dream and to reach the unreachable star—that’s what God intended for our lives when He created us.
Follow your quest—sense, dream and reach—with Him.
In His Name—Scott
