Pink Sky in the Morning

"Pink sky in the morning, sailor's warning, pink sky at night, sailor's delight." That's what my mother always used to say. I thought of that yesterday morning, when the news predicted that a bad storm was on its way. It was going to blow lots of goods off the shelves, leaving them empty. Trump said that we will not be able to buy our kids thirty dolls. "He just doesn't get it" I thought. "We're not worried about buying dolls for our kids, we're worried about putting food on the table!" We are promised that it will get better but there is no specificity about whether that will take two weeks or two years. 

I felt helpless, even as I traveled with my family down to Washington DC to participate in a May Day Protest. It seemed that nothing we did was going to change anything. On the way, I jotted down thoughts for my next blog post, but was having trouble coming up with anything hopeful to say about this situation, even from a Christian perspective. My mood was morose, quite a contrast from that of my nine-year-old niece, Sutton, who was in the back, singing. The only words of wisdom that I could come up with were from a former professor who was reflecting on his life just before he retired. He talked about how he got through the difficult times in his life by focusing solely on the problems that were right in front of him. When things got bad he would ask himself, "How am I going to get through the next day?" When things got really bad he would ask himself, "How am I going to get through the next hour?" I wrote those lines down, then paused for a moment, listening to my niece reading aloud from a funny children's book, laughing. How am I going to get through the next day? Perhaps that was the answer - with the faith of a child, always finding a reason to laugh, always finding a reason to sing. 

"I'm sorry that I can't give my girls a more just world, but I know that you'll make it a better place." Mrs. March to her daughters in the 1994 movie, "Little Women".