A Whole New World

 A Whole New World

By Bobby Neal Winters

It’s spring and flowers are popping out.  The State of Kansas has opened up the COVID vaccine to everyone.  We are primed to begin again, to build a New World for ourselves.

God created the world from nothing and then he began moving things around to put it into shape.

Each of us makes a world for ourselves, but we don’t get to start from nothing. We have to use whatever there is around us. Knowing what there is to work with is the problem. We spend our lives looking around the world’s cupboard, the world’s workshop, the world’s potting shed trying to figure out what ingredients there are.

Ever since I turned 25, I’ve been looking back and thinking what an idiot I was five years before.  All of the things I know now that I didn’t know then.

After a certain point it becomes ridiculous. You finally figure out that you are a fool and beat yourself up for that.  Then that gets ridiculous as you forgive yourself.

There’s not a rewind button, but you can take notes.

How do you build a world?  What is a world?

A world is the people you know and the things you do.

The first step in building a world by meeting people and getting to know them. 

I am not good at this part.  For the most part, I don’t like to force myself on people, and I think this is because I don’t like people to force themselves upon me.  I like to spend a lot of time in my head.  My way of reaching out to connect is writing.  I can’t force my writing on you.  If you don’t like it, you can put it down at any time.

The second step in building a world is by doing things. 

Get up in the morning; shower-shave-shoot your breakfast. Do some Bible study; learn a language; go to work and do the best job you can.  If your job is cleaning toilets, make those toilets shine.  If you work with people, treat each person you meet as if that person were Christ.  Do this even with jerks; do this especially with jerks.

You can combine steps one and two. You can do stuff with people; you can do stuff for people; you can combine these two.  

The last of these is the best.  The people you work with who want to help others inevitably make you better.  They aren’t perfect, but their imperfections are in places where you might be pretty good already. If you concentrate on where they are good, you can pick that up from them.

And, here’s the thing, you can always find people who want and need to be helped.  Jesus said this.  He said, “The poor will always be with you.”  He didn’t lay that out for you to use as an excuse not to help. He was simply stating the fact that there will always be people that you can build your world by helping.

So to build a good world for yourself, join something where you can help others: a church, a Rotary Club, or even...the Kiwanis.

Build yourself a New World, a good one, one that is full of love.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )