Only Thing We Have....

"Only Thing We Have to Fear Is Fear Itself” was a phrase that was going through my head this morning. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was the one who coined the statement in his first inaugural address. I googled the line to get more information and as I was reading it I remembered our neighbor lady who lived across the street from us on Edmond here in St. Joseph in the early 1990’s. I am sad to say I have forgotten her name but I remember who she was and how she was different from me.  It was summer and I had baked a gooseberry pie to take over to her. Tim carried baby Zach as we walked to her house just a few houses away. As we entered I was taken aback not because of any one thing but it felt like a foreign world. We stepped into her house at dusk and she was moving around in the dark with ease. I found a light switch to help us move to the back of her house where her kitchen was. We got out plates and I served up the pie. She liked the pie but she loved my baby boy more. She slowly squeezed his legs and arms and would say things like “Oh he is so perfect”.  I smiled as she made her discovery of our little man. Our neighbor was in her 90’s and blind.  She told us of her husband working for FDR in the Great Depression. Her stories made her come alive as they were full of time in her past when life was very different for her. She enjoyed telling them and we reciprocated with being a good audience. How many times in life do we spend time being afraid to step into a world of somebody who is different than us? I found out that day that we were sitting with a lady whose youth was rather exciting as she talked of the famous people she had shared her life with in the 1930’s. Who now was very alone left to sit in the dark waiting. She wasn’t asking for anything but just enjoyed our presence once we stumbled our way in. I am glad I made that pie from the berries I had picked. I am thankful we shared our buster baby with our little FDR acquaintance. I never would have thought 20 years later I would be remembering it, but it was a moment in time that did impact me. I learned it is so important to love those who are different than me. Really we had more in common than not. Really "the only thing we have to fear, is fear itself". Thanks FDR for your famous quote. Got out my "pencil" this morning-glad I did. Krista  Matt 10:26-31 26 “So do not be afraid of them, for there is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known. 27 What I tell you in the dark, speak in the daylight; what is whispered in your ear, proclaim from the roofs. 28 Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell. 29 Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care. 30 And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. 31 So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows."  "Only Thing We Have to Fear Is Fear Itself”: FDR’s First Inaugural Address Franklin D. Roosevelt had campaigned against Herbert Hoover in the 1932 presidential election by saying as little as possible about what he might do if elected. Through even the closest working relationships, none of the president-elect’s most intimate associates felt they knew him well, with the exception perhaps of his wife, Eleanor. The affable, witty Roosevelt used his great personal charm to keep most people at a distance. In campaign speeches, he favored a buoyant, optimistic, gently paternal tone spiced with humor. But his first inaugural address took on an unusually solemn, religious quality. And for good reason—by 1933 the depression had reached its depth. Roosevelt’s first inaugural address outlined in broad terms how he hoped to govern and reminded Americans that the nation’s “common difficulties” concerned “only material things.”