Fill 'Er Up!

A few weeks ago my son Ben was on his way from Abingdon back to Boone, North Carolina to settle into a new apartment and find a summer job. It was a gorgeous Saturday afternoon, with warm breezes and a cyan sky. Ben had come home for a doctor’s appointment and, to my knowledge, didn’t have anything going on that evening in Boone. So it shouldn’t have been a big deal when he was stopped in Damascus for the annual Trail Days Parade.

I was running errands when he called my cell phone. “Guess where I am?”

He hadn’t been gone long, but I really don’t like riddles and guessing games. “I dunno. Where?”

“Damascus.”

“Oh?” I asked, hoping he hadn’t been pulled over for speeding in Damascus.

“Yeah. I had to stop for the Trail Days Parade. So now I’m just sitting here.”

I immediately picked up on his tone, but I didn’t think having to stop for a parade on a beautiful Saturday sounded like such a bad thing. In fact, to me it sounded like it might be good for the soul, so I didn’t humor him. “Well that sounds cool. Enjoy!”

“Well, it’s not cool,” he shot back.

I countered with, “Can you do anything about it?”

Silence. ”Nope.”

“Then like I said, enjoy the parade. Just relax and be a Trail Days kinda guy for awhile,” I suggested. I wondered if he could hear the smile in my voice.

He used to be a Trail Days kinda guy, when he was younger. After all, Trail Days is a pretty big deal, not only locally, but up and down the east coast. Damascus has done a fine job of carving out a niche for themselves as an Appalachian Trail (AT) town, the only one, in fact, that the trail actually passes through. Damascus is also fairly close to being the halfway point on the 2,150-mile trail, which begins in Georgia and ends in Maine (or is it the other way around?). Every May, on the weekend following Mother’s Day, over 1,000 hikers, former hikers, and wannabe hikers, not to mention tourists, come together in Damascus to celebrate the AT. I’ve heard it compared with to a Grateful Dead concert...without the band, of course.

No matter the reason, Ben wasn’t into it this year, which led me to think he was looking at the situation as a glass half empty, while I saw it as a glass half full. The glass metaphor is almost a cliché. If you Google “glass half full” you’ll find 3,350,00 results, including a breast cancer CD website, a family blog I enjoyed browsing, and the website of an author, Carey Rowland, who wrote a novel titled, “Glass Half Full,” and who, ironically, lives in Boone. Maybe Ben should look him up…

I may be an optimist by nature, but I also try to purposefully see the glass as half full. This puts me at odds with The Today Show’s Matt Lauer, who admitted just the other morning that he’s a glass half empty guy. But we’ll probably never meet, so I can live with that. Even in restaurants my glass is always half full, although the wait staff (if they’re good) sees it as half empty and keeps trying to refill it. Our viewpoints may differ (I like to keep track of how much water I drink during the day), but I appreciate the attention and tip them well for their efforts.

In any case, I’ve found this much to be true: People tend to consistently pick one viewpoint over the other, whether intentionally or just by nature. If you don’t know which part of the glass you’re looking through, you can find out here.

And no matter which camp you’re in, my advice is to drink up! Take in all life has to offer, because when you look to God to fill your cup, it’ll never be dry. In fact, you may just find it’s overflowing.

“…Godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it.” ~ 1 Timothy 6:607 (NIV)