At the Sylvan Lake entrance, the park ranger took an extra minute to share updates about trails and to answer questions. At the end of the conversation, I said “thank you” and “take care”. She reflected the sentiment back to me. Then I hear my nephew from the back seat. “Take care? What does that even mean?” I explained that it is a well wish that you share at the end of a conversation with someone you appreciate. My nephew, whose arm was in a full cast from swinging on a vine that suddenly broke, scoffed, “Take care. Whatever. Why don’t you just say, ‘Send It?’”
My nieces and nephews let me see a summer vacation through child’s eyes, and it was an exquisite view! In their world, the universe is conspiring for good. Most of us are familiar with paranoia, or the belief that there are forces out to get you. Pronoia is the opposite and has risen to popularity as an attitude we can cultivate to see the good in humanity, nature, and the order of the universe. Yet, this trip had a bittersweet mission. It was a trip to remember.
Every year, my family went camping to the Black Hills of South Dakota in the most remote and beautiful places that my dad knew from his childhood growing up there. My dad would pick up overtime, saying he had to make the big bucks so we could get back to the hills.
In 1990, when his cancer had metastasized, he asked my mom to capture the trip with our video camera. That video captures our last family camping trip to the hills, showing all my siblings and I oblivious to anything but crossing creeks on logs and running up ponderosa-studded hills. I think he knew what was coming and wanted us to remember the joy and beauty. But honestly, his suffering and death later that year would become the defining event in our lives. It brought a shadow of paranoia: that everything good could be taken away, that love was too big of a risk to take again.
A lot of healing has happened since his death and this summer. My mom orchestrated a reunion tour to introduce the next generation to the special places in the Black Hills that shaped our lives. We hiked to waterfalls and plunged into the cold waters. We scrambled on rocks that I knew like old friends. We drew new stories from memories of the past, and in the process,
I felt an awakening pronoia about the world and our lives. Many receive this in church, but I have always felt it strongest in nature. The world is good. We are good. We can choose to live a good way.
My mom and I listened to Jan Goodall’s “The Book of Hope” as we drove across the plains. One of Goodall’s causes for hope is the human intellect. She shared that studying chimpanzees illuminated certain qualities of human nature that are truly unique that no other species possesses. For example, no other species can land a rover on Mars. This same intellect has caused great suffering. Human nature is often associated with plundering and devastation, but human nature is just as evident in kindness and joy. Hope is that our human intellect will be used in ways that lead to the latter.
There are a lot of worries in the world, and as we start this service year, I feel bathed in hope, the pronoia that perhaps the best is yet to come. As my nephew would say, “send it!”.