I visited my son in Texas last week and drove through the ENTIRE state on my way home. From Dallas to El Paso I saw the state of Texas. It was daylight when I passed through this amazing state. I saw cotton field after cotton field during harvest time. In the fields were huge bales of cotton, they were the size of semi truck trailers waiting to be picked up and taken to … wherever you take cotton to next. These bales had only a tarp on the top and down the sides a couple of feet from the top. The rest was open to the air, and the air pulled a number of cotton balls from the bale so it looked like there was a mini snow storm down wind of the bale. A little further down I found wind farms along the expressway. Huge windmills caught the energy flying through the flat state and made it useful. Another hundred miles down the expressway and I ran into the oil fields with the 20-foot cranes dipping down and sucking up the crude. There were huge farms of oil storage bins and pipelines.
I was amazed, not so much by the diversity, but by the usefulness and inter-connectedness of it all. Many states have that kind of diversity, and even more but when you sit and think about it, it is amazing. You have a plant which has puffy protection around its seed which has been turned into the blue you wear every day. If you aren’t wearing cotton clothes, you are probably wearing something synthetic which … is an oil byproduct. We look to oil for energy and find windmills powering the oil refineries. That same wind is what the cotton plant used to spread is fluffy seeds and fertilize itself in the fields. The more you think about it, the more complex and diverse it grows. The road I drove on was full of oil byproducts and aggregate from the land. The van was powered by oil, cooled by wind, and furnished by cotton. Usefulness, interconnectedness and amazement all flowed together in my 12 hour Texas drive.
There is an application here to our lives as well. I think we need all three to have a balanced life. We NEED to be useful, not for others but for us. We need to have a purpose in what we do. We are all interconnected. As much as we often try to ignore it, we are tied to each other and cannot get away without it. And what would life be without a touch of amazement? Amazed at a beautiful sunset or a perfect football pass. Amazed at a plan finally coming together or a plane flying. Do you have, interconnectedness, and amazement in your drive?