The Obstacle

I hope you watched Amanda Gorman's poem at the inauguration.  If you haven't, you can go back one post on my blog to find the embedded video. 

I was so impressed with her writing, her delivery, and her presence.  And that was before I found out she has struggled with learning and speech challenges. The Today show says, "Gorman, a recent graduate of Harvard University, and her twin sister were born prematurely, and according to a 2018 interview with Understood, Gorman was diagnosed with an auditory processing disorder in kindergarten and has struggled with speech articulation throughout her life. She describes it as "dropping a whole swatch of letters in the alphabet."  She was unable to pronounce the letter R until 2-3 years ago. 

Now look at this quote from the poem:

Every breath from my bronze-pounded chest,

we will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one.

We will rise from the gold-limbed hills of the west.

We will rise from the windswept northeast,

where our forefathers first realized revolution.

We will rise from the lake-rimmed cities of the midwestern states.

We will rise from the sunbaked south.

We will rebuild, reconcile and recover.

Notice all the R's.

There is a Zen Proverb that says, "Obstacles don't block the path. They are the path."  Would you choose your path to be overcoming a speech and auditory issue?  No.  But when the obstacle is there, overcoming it becomes the path.

What obstacles are in your way? Do you choose to stop walking the path? Or do you choose to make them the path? 

(Please note - I don't think every obstacles is a path that must be taken - sometimes God leads us a whole different way.  But my thoughts today are about using the obstacle as the excuse instead of the path.)