“This oak was already old when I was born. Now I am old and soon to die, and this tree grows strong still. We are small creatures. Our lives are not long, but long enough to learn.”
-Stephen Lawhead
On one corner of the Sycamore House’s kitchen, residents and a few other relevant people from the past 10 years have measured their heights.
Whenever I pause to notice, I am awed by the number of people who have lived in and loved this house. In this almost 200 year old house, 10 years is only a small time, but we do affect it in some small ways. Furniture has come and gone, random personal items like mugs, music books, and bongos have been left, a mannequin has taken permanent residence (much to our chagrin), and rooms have been painted and reshaped.
Last week my housemates and I added our own heights to the wall. Many of us have marked our height as children in our own homes. The purpose of that, of course, was to measure how much we have physically grown from the month or year to the next. Since we are adults, we are not going to get taller. Our height, like many tangible and intangible things in this world, will not change…. At least for a while. Eventually we will shrink.
Change takes a long time, especially when it is so often reversed. I could have devote this post to how some positive changes could potentially reverse in the next few years… but instead, I wanted to focus on strength.
After all, if we don’t grow in height, we grow in strength.
There are all different kind of strengths. I personally don’t have much physical strength, but I have other strengths. The majority of these strengths are ones that I’m still discovering and expanding upon. At the beginning of my year at the Sycamore House, some of my housemates and I gathered around a fire and shared what we thought were each others’ greatest strengths. That conversation and countless others has helped me I figure out that I get into social work. Furthermore, it affirmed my belief that we are stronger when we are together and when we can build each other up.
