Start.

I just finished a children’s book called “The Wheel on the School” by Meindert DeJong about a tiny fishing village in Holland where the children want the storks to come back and roost. The schoolteacher tells the little girl (who has no idea how to go about attracting them) that all she needs to do is, “Start. The rest will come.”

What extraordinary advice. Just start.

Isn’t that true about so many things that seem insurmountable in our lives? Just start cleaning out your closet. Just start writing. Just start opening your thought to the possibility of healing or forgiveness or grace. Just start.

I know it has been true for me. In all the major undertakings of my life, if I had looked too far ahead, tried to figure out just how it would all turn out, I would never have dared begin.

But to begin is what must be attempted. It gets the ball rolling and then we have some momentum, and we all know that an object in motion is easier to move than one at rest.

In the book about the storks, the act of starting proceeded to touch everyone in that village in extraordinary, unexpected, transformative ways. Ways the little girl could never have imagined.

And so it can be in our lives. As another writer  puts it: “Precept upon precept. Line upon line. Here a little, and there a little.”  (Proverbs) Until a little becomes a project completed. A home decluttered. A relationship mended: Even storks welcomed to a roof top of a little village in a make-believe town in Holland.        

Even that.

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