Unlock Your Potential

Considering the purpose of contemplative prayer and how it impacts our actions in the world.

Summer days found school-aged me trolling library shelves for reads. Drawn to titles, authors, and book covers, I nabbed one after another, silently counting (it was a library, after all, SHHHH!) up to my check-out limit.

I’m a leftie—that means I’m schooled in adapting. From elementary-school desks designed to support right arms for writing (I used mine to store extra pencils). To toilet paper dispensers hung to the right of the porcelain throne (I get a torso tone each time I take care of business). To scissors that leave me with hand cramps and ring around the thumb. (I assumed it was the price I paid for creative endeavor.) On the whole, adapting has done me good, and it’s also made me aware of adaptations others make daily that measure as bushels of potatoes to my small leftie spud.

Ask any preschool teacher. It happens almost weekly. A child, employing creativity and ingenuity, constructs from building blocks a castle or a bridge or a towering skyscraper. The child steps back to admire their work when another child darts across the room and, in a series of karate chops and swift kicks, reduces the edifice to rubble. Then a beat of silence, followed by shrieks of rage and remonstrance. The teacher steps in to soothe wounded feelings and mete out justice. Tomorrow the scene will replay with the actors switched.

Years ago, my coworkers and I were assigned a temporary boss. We quickly discovered that the man’s approach to staff supervision was that of a punitive pirate captain toward his lazy, ne’er-do-well deck hands. We survived by keeping our heads down, swabbing the decks, and praying daily for deliverance. We were trapped with Captain Blood in a dead calm; every day had a “walk-the-plank” feel. To make matters worse, we’d no idea how long our “lost at sea” season would last.