Sparrow Among the Eagles.

About 16 years ago I started my teaching career. The first year was very traumatic, I was given a year 9 class of students for both Science and Math’s that was full of students that seem to have no interest in an education. A few years later I saw one of the boys and as you do, I said, “Hey, what are you doing now?” hoping some switches have turned on for him. His answer was, “Nothing.” Indicating that he was unemployed and bludging off his parents. My response was “Oh, that’s what you did at school!” to which he gave a huffy laugh.

In the early 1970’s, at the age of 19 I had decided that I was going to go around the world investigating world religions and try and come up with the meaning of life. I was currently in my hometown. I pulled into a petrol station and the girl that served me I had known from high school. She asked me what I was doing, and I told her about my impending word trip to which she replied, “I wish I could go on a world trip but I am trapped here working.”

As I reflected on these two stories I was reminded of a teacher friend turned pastor, Robert (Bob)  Parr, who told me the following story. It was recorded in his book “Sparrow Among the Eagles.”

An ex-student came to see him one day, his eyes glistening about travel. “What exactly are your plans?” Bob asked.

               “Just to get up and go,” he replied. “POW!” and he smashed a fist into his open hand. “Anything!” he went on. “I’d give anything to be up, up and A_W_A_A_A_AY!” “Now! No waiting!”

               “But surely,” Bob replied, “you have some plan. You must know where you are going, what you want to do when you get there, and things like that. Surely you know something of your destination.”  He looked at Bob with a face that fairly oozed pity. Bob was old you see. How could he understand the complex forces that were operating in his effervescent mind? How could he possibly know what it meant to him, a lively 20-year-old, to be young and filled with the spirit of adventure? Bob wondered why he even bothered to try to explain all that was in his heart.

               “I want to see the world while I am young,” he trilled. “I want to visit exotic places and do, well, exotic things. I want to live a little. I want to see the world and visit places that are beyond the ken of the ordinary man!” he rhapsodized, almost oblivious to Bob’s presence.

               “I am too young to be fettered,” he went on. “To young to be manacled to an office desk. Too young, to be free, to be chained to the humdrum of life’s ordinary things. Youth is fleeting,” he exclaimed with a fine burst of rhetoric, “and I mean to cram it to the brim with adventure – wonderful, wonderful, WONDERFUL adventure.”

Bob felt something ought to be said, and since he was the only one there, he was obviously the one to say it. Moreover, the young man looked at Bob as if he ought to be impressed with his dramatic display, his rhetorical fire. There was nothing that Bob wanted to say; so, he fell back on, “Well, bully for you.” Then in a flash of near-genius inspiration, he added, “And when do you go?” You see Bob had calculated that, even if he didn’t know where he was going, he at least must have some inkling as to when he would commence this high adventure.

Silence.

“When,” asked Bob again, “do you go? Set off? Take to the wild blue yonder? Go, man, go? When?”

He was silent still. Then poking a thoughtful toe into the pile of the carpet, he almost mumbled, “That’s the trouble. I don’t know that either.”

“Well,” Bob went on, eager to hold up his end of the conversation, “Never mind a precise date. Just give me the approximate time, and you can count on me to come and say Bon Voyage.”

Finally, he looked at Bob and admitted, “I have no plans. I guess I’m not going anywhere.”

               “Not going anywhere?  Bob echoed. “You just said…”

               “Yeah,” he answered, “I just said, but I was only talking. I really wasn’t saying anything, I guess I was just putting on an act. So many of my friends are off on working holidays. So many are on scholarships to study or do something like that. You know how it is, it gets in your blood. I was only going in my imagination. Me, travel? I couldn’t even get on a ferry and ride across the harbour to Manly right now. I’m broke. flat broke.”

He looked sheepish. His friends were going places. He was staying home. Not that home is a bad place. Many of us are very happy there.  But when you have made such a song about your going and then having to confess that it is all a pipe dream, that is enough to make anyone a bit sheepish.

               Bob mumbled, “Um, too bad,” lacking anything better to contribute.

Almost fiercely he turned on Bob and boomed out, “It’s not ‘too bad’ at all, it’s my own stupid fault.”

               “It is?”

               “It is! Listen, you knew me at school, right?

               “Right.”

               “You even sent me up to old What’s-his-name for letting off a firecracker in the playground one day, remember?”  Bob nodded.

               “You know what you told me afterward? You said that if I didn’t pull up my socks, I’d never do anything much. You told me that I had the brains, but I was too bone lazy to use them. You told me that I had all the qualifications of a likable rogue. Do you remember that?”

               “Only faintly.”

               “Well, you did. But I frittered my time away. Now half of my class are genuine jetsetters, or they are going up the ladder. You know what I was doing up to last week? Operating a stop and go sign.” He paused to let that sink in.

               “Well,” Bob began, “It’s honest work. There’s no disgrace…”

               He held up his hand to silence Bob’s lame protest. “Don’t say it. I did waste my time at school. I wasted my time when I went to work at a job my father got for me with a friend of his. When they couldn’t stand me anymore, do you know what my father did? He asked his friend how much he owed him for putting up with me for eighteen months! That’s the kind of useless character I am.” Then he uttered the ultimate expression of his disgust: “Jet set! Me? Ha!”

Bob told me he had never felt so sorry for a young man. He felt sorry for him, bereft of his dignity, shorn of his self-respect, because he didn’t have the good sense to grab opportunities that were loaded onto him. What a pity! Left behind by others with minds much inferior to his, and all because he was born privileged. He was a tragedy in living colour. For all to see.

As he left Bob he said, “Thanks for not laughing.

We need to reflect on this because even in this prosperous day, a person’s worth is still measured by the ability they show, the ingenuity and the initiative they display, and the muscle they put into the preparation for the thing called life.