Graham Chastney

Is anyone’s life ever “a bed of roses”, I don’t think mine ever is. Having said that, I’m not sure I understand the phrase, it’s one that I have used all my life, but I’m not sure I would ever really want to lie down on a load of roses, especially ones with the thorns still attached. As the phrase comes from a poem I’m assuming they are talking about something more akin to a bed of rose petals, but perhaps I’ve completely missed the point.

Anyway, life isn’t “a bed of roses” it has its moments, but normally life has its highs and lows. In the middle of a high or a low seeing a smile is fantastic thing.

There’s an Irish saying which goes like this: “It is easy to be pleasant when life flows by like a song, but the man worth while is the one who will smile when everything goes dead wrong. For the test of the heart is trouble, and it always comes with years, and the smile that is worth the praises of earth is the smile that shines through the tears.”

When I was little someone once said something similar to this to me: “A smile is worth a million pounds, but costs nothing”. It’s stuck with me through the years.

Job said this, speaking from a place of desperation and commenting on how people’s attitude to him had changed: “When I smiled at them, they could hardly believe it; their faces lit up, their troubles took wing!”

There are thousands of quotations about a smile. The last one from me for now comes from William Shakespeare’s Othello: “The robbed that smiles, steals something from the thief.”

A smile is clearly a very powerful thing. They cost nothing. There is no limit on their use. The government doesn’t tax their use. They don’t require any special training or even a weekly work-out. Smiling takes some effort on our behalf, but not that much.

Smiles are also infectious, how many times do we give someone a smile and not get one in return? How many of you looked at the picture of Emily smiling in the snow and didn’t smile yourself?

Go on give a smile today and make someone’s day.

Knowing that you have made someone smile is a double blessing. I’ve recently had a number of people contact me saying how Jimmy and Grandad have made them smile. These comments come from all sorts of people in all sorts of places around the globe and that just makes the feeling better.

At the end of a business meeting someone smiled at me an thanked me for the smiles that these little wooden dolls had given them. It was a bit of a surreal experience where my work life and my private life intersected in a way I hadn’t expected.

Get over there and have a look, it will make you smile.

As we look at a horizon we are looking at the end of the visible earth and the beginning of the visible sky. This isn’t the beginning of sky it’s just the beginning of our view of it.

If we drop our eyes from the horizon we see all the high-points of the lands laid out before us. Lots of different layers; trees, houses, hills, mountains even, all the things that stand above everything else between you and them. As we drop our eyes the number of layers that we see reduces until all we see is the layer we are standing on.

If we lift our eyes from the horizon we get a completely different experience. At any point as we lift our eyes we see another new set of layers and strata. It doesn’t matter how high we lift our eyes we still see a full set of strata. Sometimes the strata that we can see are a long, long, long way away. Sometimes the strata are very close indeed. The strata that we see are never the same there is always something new going on up there, especially in the UK where the weather changes by the minute, not by the season.

Just before we went on our skiing holiday it was so mild that Sue and I sat out in the garden and had lunch, a very surreal experience for February in Lancashire. We were already looking forward to our holiday and we sat there and watched the sky being criss-crossed by plane after plane. Some were obviously huge jumbos, others smaller. Each one housing people on a journey, each journey a story. We sat and imagined what those stories might be and looked forward to the story that our own planned flight would soon be creating. Every now and then a micro-light would fly over making us realise how high up those planes were and how far we could see.

Lyndon Johnson said “A clear stream, a long horizon, a forest wilderness and open sky—these are man’s most ancient possessions. In a modern society, they are his most priceless.”

While we were on holiday we experienced the sky in many different ways. On the first couple of days it was blue and there was no wind. Para-gliders took people on trips around the mountain and again I imagined what it would be like to float up there with them. On the third day the sky changed, in the morning we again had glorious sunshine, by the evening though the sky had come down to meet us bringing snow. The two pictures are taken from the hotel in the morning as we left to ski and in the evening on our return. Our close encounter with the sky continued for another day, but was followed by another different sky with fluffy clouds but not above us, below us.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said that “The sky is the daily bread of the eyes”.

The sky is something we live under every day, we can ignore it if we choose, we can even choose to hide away from it in our houses, but for me the sky keeps calling. But what is is calling?

King David wrote these words in Psalm 19:

The heavens tell of the glory of God. The skies display his marvelous craftsmanship. 

Day after day they continue to speak; night after night they make him known. 

They speak without a sound or a word; their voice is silent in the skies; yet their message has gone out to all the earth, and their words to all the world.

I’m not sure whether a ‘milestone’ has the same meaning the world over so here’s the definition from www.dictionary.com.

“milestone”

• A stone marker set up on a roadside to indicate the distance in miles from a given point.
• An important event, as in a person’s career, the history of a nation, or the advancement of knowledge in a field; a turning point.

We still see milestones dotted around the UK countryside and within some towns. Many of them have fallen into disrepair but some are maintained by communities as beloved objects, but I’m not talking about that type of milestone.

The life milestones have come thick and fast in the Chastney family over the last few weeks, and there are a number still to come. There is phrase from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night that goes like this:

Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ’em.

I feel that milestones deserve a similar saying:

We are born into some milestone, some milestones we achieve, and some milestones are thrust upon us.

We all have birthdays, we are born into them. Three of us in this household have birthdays within a month. Jonathan is the first, followed by Emily and then myself. Birthdays are always milestones because they demonstrate the end of one year and highlight the start of another one. Jonathan is moving through his teens and is going through rapid change that will see him transform from a boy to a man. The young man who had his birthday last week was significantly different to the one who had a birthday twelve months ago.

Being a man I am in nature oriented to achieving goals; aiming for a target; seeking to pass a milestone. The other week we chose to go on a skiing holiday. Part of making that choice was subscribing to a goal of taking the first steps in being an accomplished skier. I can’t speak for the others in the party, but for me there was a level of competency which had to be achieved.

As parents Sue and I have our children’s milestones thrust upon us. As Jonathan transitions through adolescence we have to face our own milestones. We are no longer the parents of child, our role has changed. Sometimes life contrives to thrust other milestones upon us, because that’s life.

Every milestone brings an opportunity to look both ways. We have an opportunity to look back at how we have reached this milestone. We also have the opportunity to look forward to the next milestone. Sometimes a milestone is so big that looking forward from it is difficult, even painful. If all we do is stand at a milestone and look back we can’t move on to the next one. A milestone is meant to mark a point on a journey which is not yet complete, it’s not there to tell you that you have arrived.

As a Christian I see my faith as a journey, with milestones. Sometimes I manage to reach the milestones, sometimes I fall short. It doesn’t stop me trying to reach the next one. The Apostle Paul said it like this:

I’m not saying that I have this all together, that I have it made. But I am well on my way, reaching out for Christ, who has so wondrously reached out for me. Friends, don’t get me wrong: By no means do I count myself an expert in all of this, but I’ve got my eye on the goal, where God is beckoning us onward–to Jesus. I’m off and running, and I’m not turning back.

Philippians 3:12–14