On the morning of April 12th a team from our community have put together a car show -   great cars, great food and great conversation - come and join if you’re in the central fl area.  Contact me for details here.

cheers, mark

fight4humanity.com 

fight4humanity.com.

I thought I heard the music today.

I saw August Rush at the theater this week. This one is a movie that will probably polarize everyone who sees it. To many it will be a cheesy, feel-good schmaltz-fest with little or no bearing on real-world living. As a story, many will dismiss it (and as I look at critical feedback many have!!) as boring and pointless.

So why do I love it so much?

***SPOILER ALERT - No major plot points given away, but read on at your own risk***

It’s the story of a boy who hears music everywhere. In the fields, the wind, the traffic, the thud of a basketball, the rain, the sun. All of it . . . a massive orchestra playing in harmony with a universal music being played for those who can listen.

It begins with our child protagonist waxing lyrical about a music that he hears all around us, but that many become unable to hear. It is a music that wraps around and seeps into the cracks of everyday living, and he tells us that the music beckons us to a greater reality, a deeper living. Some of us (we are told) have instruments that can play this music, if we will only learn to hear it. When we do join the music, something extraordinary happens - people open up. Others hear us play, and want to begin to play along. Haunting melodies and harmonies intertwine as the orchestra that is real life plays. When asked where his music comes from he replies that it is “as if someone is shouting it to me. When I write it down it’s like I’m calling it back to them.”

As a story it doesn’t really impact me . . . It’s too far fetched . . . unless . . .

Unless it does indeed reflect (unintentionally) a greater truth. What if we imagine, or even dare accept, that there might be a greater reality around us - a mystical reality that inhabits our world but often remains hidden except to those with eyes to see? - Then the fable of August Rush could take on a different meaning entirely.

What if there truly is a music that is being played all the time from this greater reality? If so then could it be that in “real life” we could use our gifts and talents to play along and become a part of something bigger, deeper and more mysterious than any of us ever dreamed? What if our role was simply to learn to hear the music again, and then to learn to play in harmony with that? What if when we did, others would catch a glimpse of a Deeper Music and perhaps even align themselves with it and find that life seemed . . . more “right.”?

What if this music really was a call from a Mystic? And that we could call it back? Ridiculous I know . . . I could be wrong. But I’m trying to listen.

And crazy though it seems, I thought I heard the music today.

I don’t know where they came from, but they DO walk among us. They were here . . . Just minutes ago.

It was unplanned - a short phone call: “we are coming.”  Minutes later another call: “we are here”.

They walked silently into the room, all four of them.  A question was asked, but the answer never shared vocally.  We sat for some time - not a word was uttered, and yet there was a complete understanding.  They had what they came for, and the future had been planted.  Now to wait, but for what?

What does the future look like?

Click here to take the lost quiz for yourself

Your results:
You are John Locke

John Locke 70% Mr. Eko 60% Sayid Jarrah 60% Michael Dawson 56% Boone Carlyle 55% Claire Littleton 52% Dr. Jack Shephard 52% Charlie Pace 52% Walt Lloyd 48% Hugo “Hurley” Reyes 46% Sun Kwon 45% Kate Austen 40% Jin-Soo Kwon 40% Shannon Rutherford 36% James “Sawyer” Ford 35% Ana-Lucia Cortez 32%	You have experienced things out of the ordinary and because of that you have faith. You are also a good strategist and hunter.

This Thursday a gathering from our community will hang out and watch “The Guardian” (See review below) and chat about themes of saving lives, living lives and risking everything.  Join us or contact me for more details.

Are you inside or outside?

Why?

I watched The Guardian yesterday. 

It’s awash with Kevin Costner’s aging heroic wisdom and Ashton Kutcher’s wisecracks, and it follows every cliche you could think of it. And yet it works. For me, at least.

I think it’s because it’s real.  There really are coastguards; they really are almost invisible (when was the last time you thought of one or saw them on the news?); they really do rescue people in trouble; they really do risk their lives for others.  They swim, they train, they live, they die.  The film may have been a predictable drama, but I have a feeling the lives of these heroes are also predictably dramatic  - In other words I guess they can pretty much predict their lives will regularly involve risking everything to save others.

Why it impacted me?  Are we not called to the same devotion to the pledge “so others may live”?  Should that not be the imprint on our lives?  When so many in the world are dying of AIDS, poverty, hunger, abuse and oppression do we not have to be the ones who will risk everything to “save as many as we can”?  Just as the people drowning were isolated and unknown by the world, so many on our spinning planet drown in injustice mostly unnoticed.  We know that we can never solve all the problems, but we can (as Randall puts it) “try to save the weakest and most desperate first”. 

 

Is it not in doing this that we become more fully human?  So let us accept our mission and step out into the waves . . . so others may live.

See it. You won’t regret it.