The Neighborhood Encourager

Spilling the Light.
(photo N Pendergast)

Yesterday I skipped my early morning Bible Guys to catch Annie O’Neil and Terry Hershey for the Pilgrimage in Place Zoom. It was a great meeting and I hope everyone else got as much out of it as I did. It had Camino Dust all over it.

To the best of my knowledge Terry has never walked the Camino but he is a prime candidate for some future adventure in Spain. He lives a few miles from us here on Vashon Island. We’ve been to his place a few times for dinner but have never gotten a tour of his property. One of the things he is known for is his garden which he calls his sanctuary.

But what I wanted to get to was… Sorry, I need to digress a moment. I remember from somewhere in my early learning at Buffalo Public School 24 that we writers should never start a sentence with “But”. But I am so glad that I am over that and have now progressed to starting paragraphs with it. I am taking momentary joy in this, thanks. So, what I wanted to get to was that Terry is such an encourager for me and undoubtedly for others. He always says when we part, “Keep spilling the light!”

Keep spilling the light to you too! Right? What a great thing to say and then think about. It sort of implies that you have such an abundance of the darn stuff that people around you can’t help but get some on them. Like Camino Dust it just happens when you are around. “We can’t help ourselves”, as Annie says.

Which gets us back to one of the major lessons of the Camino, that we are here to buoy each other up. That maybe we even exist to buoy each other up. We are not hermits. Although there seems to be a time and place for that too. So, our neighborhood will be kinder and stronger if we can keep this light moving. What was that old Sunday School song about not hiding it under a bushel (a basket).

no bushels loves, Felipé.

2 thoughts on “The Neighborhood Encourager”

  1. Hi boss,

    I was in another mission (funny enough, related to Vashon Island too!) on Saturday my midday so couldn’t join the morning call, but was in the afternoon call and I thought it was amazing… Terry said many deep things, but two really left me thinking over and over it… One of them is a topic we had discussed extensively here… this sense that “we are enough as we are”… while doing my homework for the blog book, one of the things that called my attention is the many times that we stated in either posts or comments, that in the Camino we were able to be just us, “BE” really, and not exactly defined ourselves for what we do…
    And the other thing I loved from Terry’s talk yesterday, was how different it is to do landscaping vs having a garden… eye opening!

    And well, we had also an amazing discussion on ancestors and “land owners”, started by Annie… and I even ended exchanging some text messages in facebook with Terry after the call… Cannot stop thinking how connected we are to each other… At times, when connections like these happen, I think God is looking at us, sighing, both relieved and doing a “facepalm” gesture, while exclaiming: “Oh lord, finally!”

    Vashon love Loves,
    Cris

    1. Cris ~ glad that you enjoyed Terry. He is special and Annie is getting really good at bringing the best out of her guests. Have a good week! Felipé.x

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