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10 years ago, I was watching my Potential and Opportunities dissolve and evaporate in an ocean of cheap gin and expensive whiskey.

But 5 years ago, I was in Rehab.

One of the exercises they had us perform was to imagine ourselves happy, 5 years in the future.

Many of us in that room had forgotten how to imagine nice things happening to them. A few snorted (well, I snorted), finding the notion that we’d even still be around in 5 years grimly humorous.

For about half of us, it was the last stop on the way down.

But I indulged the therapist. I was there, after all, because I did not want to die. So, I imagined myself, 5 years hence.

Happy.

It came to me all at once; an artistic remix on Norman Rockwell’s Freedom From Want, reframed with myself placing food at the table.

Sunday Dinner At My Place, I answered, when it came my turn to share my fantasy. I was asked what food I imagined eating.

It’s not the meal itself, I said, it’s the implications framed around it. Sunday Dinner At My Place means that I have a Place. It means that I have Family that will actually speak to me and friends who actually want to see me. It means money enough not just to feed myself but others too. It means having the time to spare to take the time preparing the meal.

A lot of nodding heads all around me. A struck chord. Many people with no Place, in that place. Nowhere that would lament their leaving.

5 years hence, as I lay down to sleep in my Home, with my Wife and my Son, surrounded by my Art and my Flowers, I reflect.

It was a long road. It was hard. We lost people. So many people. There were long days and long nights and hospital stays. Angry arguments with ghosts. I changed, in ways I never hoped for, or expected. Good ways, finally, for once. Slowly, against the backdrop of a world in chaos, I found my mind.

Sometimes, My Wife wondered aloud, what she did to deserve me. After some stumbling with my feelings, I eventually settled on an answer.

I’m a Rescue.

She gave me a Home.

And, so, I gave her a Family.

It seemed fair

This Sunday, my folks, which whom I have not had a shouting match in years, will come over for dinner. We will cook and eat together. My Friend became My Wife, and she took a piece of me and with it she made Our Son. There will be many hugs, and no violence. Good Things Happened.

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but you don’t know what the future holds.

don’t give up yet, ok?

There was a time when the world was built upon different assumptions. Not better people. Not smarter people. Just different assumptions.

The assumption was that a broken chair would be repaired. That a worn tool would be sharpened. That a machine would be rebuilt rather than discarded. That a man who did not yet know how to do something could learn.

The assumption was that usefulness was not purchased, but made.

Open an old magazine and you can still see it between the pages. Instructions for building a boat in the backyard. Plans for a radio assembled on the kitchen table. Articles explaining how to pour concrete, wire a workshop, repair an engine, build a cabinet, raise a barn.

No one stopped to explain why an ordinary person was capable of these things. It was simply assumed.

The world expected participation.

Somewhere along the way, the assumptions changed.

Now we are surrounded by things we are not meant to open, repair, modify, or understand. We are told to replace rather than mend, to hire rather than learn, to consume rather than create. And because we hear it often enough, many begin to believe that building is the work of specialists, and repair the work of experts.

Yet the old assumptions still linger in certain places.

They live in machine shops where tools older than their owners still earn their keep. They live in workshops where scraps of steel become brackets, where worn bearings are replaced instead of ignored, where old radios glow to life after decades of silence. They live in garages, barns, basements, and sheds. They live in calloused hands and notebooks filled with measurements.

Most of all, they live in the quiet belief that nearly anything can be understood if one is willing to spend enough time with it.

That is the oldest assumption of all.

A broken machine is not a mystery. It is a lesson waiting to be learned.

A missing part is not the end of a project. It is a problem waiting for a solution.

A thing does not lose its value simply because it requires effort. Perhaps that is why old tools, old buildings, and old machines feel different. They come from a world that expected stewardship. They were built by people who assumed someone would care for them after they were gone.

To hold something once meant more than possession. It meant responsibility. It meant maintenance. It meant repair. It meant preserving what was worth preserving and passing it on with a little more life left in it than when it was received.

Those assumptions have become less common, but they have not disappeared. They survive wherever someone looks at a broken thing and says, "Let's see if I can fix it." They survive wherever someone looks at a problem and says, "I can learn." They survive wherever creation is valued more than convenience.

And in those places, the old world has not vanished completely. It is still there, quietly waiting, built upon old assumptions.

Practice Stewardship!