Newspaper Taxis Appear on the Shore

One of the great arguments I'm waiting to have with someone is "who recorded the best Beatles cover song ever?".  My two cents:  I go back and forth between songs, but most days I'd say it's the Elton John cover of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.


Some the guitar work and the backing vocals on the studio recording are actually courtesy of John Lennon himself.

I'm not sure why I was thinking about this song on the way to work on Friday, well over and above the fact that it's simply a great song.

Work itself, well that's been a different story.

We had someone at work pass away, unexpectedly, the week before last.  The details are neither needed or appropriate for this venue.  My last posting, how I think God is speaking to us all the time, was really how I was processing what happened at work.  I readily confess that it's far too easy for me to get caught up in the minutiae of work, where I'll end up hanging thoughts on some event or action that likely have no more real meaning than a bird flying across the sky.  I, and I suspect others, forget far too easily that much of our work life is really composed of trivia.  I know, that sounds like I am trivializing what I...and others...do for a living, but that's not my intent.  Rather, I'm saying with all the conviction I can gather that in the great lists that compose our lives, a turn of a phrase by a manager, a benefits change we may not like, a co-worker that may make co-working somewhat difficult, well in the grand scheme of things they all really just don't matter all that much.

What matters?  Well, that's what I can't say for sure.

I do know this:  We're given opportunities all the time to experience and learn.  That's a constant.  What seems to vary is our desire and ability to learn.  The lessons are out there, all around us, waiting to be experienced, but yet what do we spend our time on?  The fact that our manager is too directive?  That we aren't "respected" enough?  That's just more trivia.  No, today's lesson is that there is a higher order out there, a better way to see and experience the world based on a choice we all can make, as long as we remember to do so.

I am deeply saddened by our loss at work and starkly reminded that, at some point, our turn at mortality will come as well.  How and where we spend the space between now and then...a space that could span minutes or decades...is up to us.  I think that's what God was trying to tell me last week.