KINGSVIEW

THE STORY OF THE MAN WHO LOVED MUCH AND LOST LITTLE

Michael A. King

This is the story of a man who loved much and lost little. He lost little because he loved so much that whenever he lost still there was something else left to love. But that’s the end of the story, not the beginning. At the beginning of the story, this was a man who lost much and loved little. So what is the story of how the man got from one to the other?

It’s really a short and simple story. He grew older. And older. And even older. And with each leap of aging he loved more and lost less. It’s as simple as that.

What did age have to do with it, though? Maybe that much more of the story needs a word or two of explanation. Here: Each leap of aging came after the man had been hammered and hurt by life. And with each hammer, and each hurt, the man grew happier. It’s as simple as that.

Of course, perhaps it would be helpful to say just a word or two about how hammering and hurting led to happiness. Here: Before the man was hammered and hurt, he wanted to be bigger and bigger and better and better. There was nothing wrong with this man. That’s really what most men want, to be bigger and better. That’s why this man and so many men dream of things like being the home run king or the President of the United States or the first man on Mars. Bigger and better, whatever it is.

But the hammering and the hurt made him not smaller and smaller, exactly, but, how to put it, more leathery maybe. More leathery. And that’s why it led to happiness.

But if that’s still too cryptic, here: Leathery means weathered, no-frills, close to the earth, burned by sun and wind, chapped and wrinkled skin, few pretenses. What is is what is. What you see is what you get. Leathery means in this case not the worst of the old Western cowboy myth—which itself was one more variation on bigger and better, larger, meaner—but the best.

When you get leathery, you get happy. Not because you’re no longer hammered. Not because you no longer hurt. You still do. And some of the hammering and the hurt get worse, because the leaps of aging make you smaller and smaller, like you remember happening to your father, who started out so big and strong and handsome and then as the ending drew nearer got smaller and smaller, bent, limping, holding onto the handrails. That hurt to see. That was a hammer. And it hurts to feel the hammer hammering you down to a size like that.

But what if the point of your life isn’t bigger and better? What if the point of your life—in the mystery and tragedy and grandeur that is the human story—is to become more you? What if becoming more you is, precisely, to little by little let go of being bigger and bigger and let yourself become smaller and smaller if that’s what it means to be you as the leaps draw you closer to the end?

And what if within the mystery of it all it turns out that the closer to being you you are, the happier you are? Then it could actually make sense that to be hammered and to hurt is to be happy. That’s what happened to the man in the story.

Is it a story with a happy ending? It depends on whether you believe in it. If you believe bigger and better is the only happy ending, then this is a tragic story and not redeemable. But if you believe being you could be a happy ending, then this story just gets happier and happier right to the end.

—Michael A. King, Telford, Pennsylvania, is pastor, Spring Mount (Pa.) Mennonite Church, and editor, DreamSeeker Magazine.