No, this is not a movie title--I promise I'll get back to that on my next post.  This is the name of my paternal grandfather, who passed away last Thursday.  I'd like to talk about him a little bit.

Grandpa Ray and Grandma Lorraine are the parents of ten--yes, ten--children.  They spent their lives farming in rural Idaho, working harder than you or I can imagine and earning just enough money to support their large family.  Grandpa's faith in the gospel was unwavering, as was his commitment to living it.  He left behind no impressive titles, no big money.  No advanced degree, no lofty church calling.  He'd gained little of what doesn't matter and earned everything that does.  At the service, my aunt said that in one generation from now, Grandpa's posterity will likely exceed 500 people.  That number will, of course, multiply tenfold in years to come.  Today I listened to stories of the warmth, affection, gentle disipline, and tender teaching this man offered his family.  He'd given them all that he had, in every capacity.  My mind, quite on its own, drifted from the small country chapel to the greater country at large, and the political hysteria that's been racking it in recent months.  I thought of the many hopefuls on the local and national levels, and the god-like status they would be flung to upon winning their victories.  How loud their acclaim will be, how noisy their triumph.  My mind found it's way back into the meeting room, warm with the bodies and breath and tears of Grandpa's descendants.  In a few years, five hundred of us will claim his name.  Then one thousand...two thousand.  I wondered:  who is really shaping this nation?  And more troubling:  who am I allowing to shape me?

Distance is, and always has been, alluring.  Most of us yearn to attach ourselves to a cause, or at least a platform, larger and more sophisticated than ourselves, be it intellectual, political or otherwise.  Grandpa didn't have this luxury; he had ten mouths to feed.  He dealt in realities, and in doing so afforded his children, and their children, the unprecedented opportunity to deal in the abstract.  His progeny gets to learn from the safe remove of academic theory and self-imposed virtue about a variety of subjects that may have (probably have) little to do with their real growth and purpose, here and now.  Listening to my aunt's life sketch of Grandpa, I cringed to think how often my vertical quest for Self____ (insert noun here:  Fulfillment, Progression, Aggrandization, Gratification) precludes me from a horizontal quest to help others.  To understand, not influence.  To create, not consume.  I cringed to think how often I'd been seduced by the allure of the distant rather than thrilled by the immediate, which is all we ever really have.  I cringed to think about how, sometimes, I am more passionate about remote issues than I am about the people I claim to be most passionate about.

I once heard a mother of eight compare her life to a white frosted cake.  She said, "To the world, my life looks boring and plain.  But to me," she then swiped a bit of the frosting and licked it off her finger, "it's rich and sweet and spectacular."  I couldn't describe my Grandpa Ray's life any better. Simple to the onlookers, heavenly to the partakers.  Rich.  Sweet. Spectacular.