State Representative David Bly, MN District 25B

Easter time always takes me back to the year my father died 1968, it was a Good Friday stuck between sleet and snow and spring blossoms.  I remember waking to a white sky and my mother running up the stairs to tell me my father had passed away in the middle of the night.  He remains perhaps the strongest influence in my life someone I always try to live up to. Always hopeful yet tempered by the limitations reality puts on us.  For my father the limitations of a short life kept others from knowing him and diabetes kept him from achieving his dreams.  He gave equally of his time to everyone.  People liked him, he was a good listener someone they could trust.  

All of his adult life he was involved in Boy Scouts wanting to build character and give to boys what he had been given by older mentors. He was quiet about the service he gave to others, never promoting himself always praising others.  He was someone who when asked if he had changed the world might say,  “It was not required of me to change the world only to believe and act as if I could.”  I find I often think about the things I learned from my father like that our joy is deepened by our knowledge of sorrow and loss; and we only lose when we give up.

I don’t know how many of you caught it but there was a great Easter program on Meet the Press involving a conversation about God in Society, I was intrigued by the comments that Michael Lerner made about how we have lost our sense of the spiritual replaced by those things we can know and measure with our senses.  It struck me that regardless of what God you believe in or whether you believe in the divine there is wisdom in this comment that what we value must be more than what we can see.  Whether in education or in social status there has to be more to it than just what we can measure with standards or consumption.  We must also be measured by who we are to each other in fellowship and community.  We are a great nation and a great people when we embrace the world not when we strike out against it.