As I drove to work today, I was listening to a news story about the man who just won the Nobel Prize for chemistry. The NPR reporter described how in 1982, Daniel Shechtman made a discovery that changed the way we look at solid matter and ultimately revolutionized chemistry and re-wrote all the world’s text books.
But not at first…
Initially, the discovery that would win him the Nobel Prize garnered him nothing but mockery. His publications were a laughing stock and he was ridiculed and labeled by many as more science fiction than science.
It was not until almost two decades after making his discovery that the world came to know this work as groundbreaking, revolutionary, and brilliant. Today, Dan Schectman is a celebrated scientist but he is keenly aware that this was in no way an overnight occurrence.
It seems to me that this is often the way of things. Great discoveries, ideas, and even people have to go through a process before the greatness that they hold comes to fruition.
In the Christian tradition, there is a story told about Jesus healing a man who was blind. The man asked for healing and Jesus did what I would consider a weird thing. He took him out of town and he spit in the man’s eyes.
Yes. Right. He spit in his eyes. Check it out if you don’t believe me.
Then he asked the man if he could see. The man said “…I see men like trees, walking.” In other words, the healing he had asked for was there a little bit, but it was not yet complete. So, Jesus put his hands on the man’s eyes and again asked how his sight was. This time, he could see fully.
In most of the traditional stories told about Jesus healing people or doing other miraculous stuff, he always does something quick and complete…but not this time. And I have always wondered why.
I’ll write more some other time about why I think the story is told this way, but in the mean time, I will simply be glad to remember that most great things seem to have to go through process…and I hope great things in me are in that process now. I’m not out to revolutionize the world of physics, but I am quite certain that there is something more for all of us to do and I am totally jazzed to be consciously “in process”. In fact, I’m just as excited to see how this is playing out in the lives of everyone I know or know of.
So, this blog is about the process of moving from blurrily seeing “men like walking trees” to clearly seeing all that is meant to be. It will contain stories, songs, writings and stuff of triumph and failure, epiphanies and long unanswered questions. If that interests you, I’ll see you around.
D. John Dyben
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