Please allow me to introduce myself. On second thought, I'm not especially important. In a world of 8 billion people, I'm just one of them. And yet — and yet — I serve a God who cares about every sparrow and every flower in every field, so perhaps just maybe he cares about me, too, and you, and so I should care about myself and about you and about those 8 billion other humans. We are all irreplaceable, beings who will pass this way only the once with our unique set of circumstances and experiences and what is it that makes us.

As long as I have paused to contemplate what to write next, let me get my first cup of coffee.

Coffee is among so many miracles of human experience. How did someone years ago decide to try grinding the beans and boiling the results to produce a comforting drink with the power to wake the senses? Look at a coffee plant; how do you make that leap? And what insight prompted humans to generate electricity or forge metal or assemble days into seconds, minutes and hours? How do you go from living in caves to building caves, or from scrawling words on paper to sending your words to every corner of the earth?

Every mind is a miracle, our every act an accumulation of all that has gone before and an expression of hopes and dreams. And when one of us has lost hopes and dreams and even prayers — when, for example, he/she begins to believe they are only one of 8 billion people and that thought drifts into melancholy — we must lift them and remind them that each life is worthy of notice by the God of the universe — or if, which is also true, none of us is worthy, then we must share our gratitude for that God's eternal love, and in God's footsteps we should love one another, even those who did not get the memo and have sworn to be our enemies.

If I love my neighbors, no one is my enemy, and if you see yourself as my enemy, then you are gravely mistaken, but it will not change the fact that you are my neighbor and I love you.

This is not an easy attitude to maintain, and when I struggle at it, I am grateful to the God of the universe for setting the example.

And here my pride starts to creep in — "These are good words," I say to myself. "I must share them with the world." Who am I to think any of my little thoughts are big enough to share? But even someone who is no more important than anyone else may say something that others may want to contemplate and share. One of those no-more-important-than-anyone-else people once upon a time suggested boiling coffee beans to make a beverage.

And so I write these thoughts down in a book meant for myself, but also meant to launch what thoughts may benefit others. This is my message to myself, and I share it on paper (and later in bytes) in small part with the hope and perhaps even the belief that others might see dare-I-say wisdom in them.

I begin to lose the point when I begin to focus on who I am or try to assign any value to my words, although I must admit the source of my message did say "Love your neighbor as yourself," and so if I am to love my neighbor I must also find love in my heart for myself. And so I write these words and say, "Here are my thoughts; what are your thoughts? Yours are as important as mine, and as we listen to one another and find common ground, we move forward in peace."

And there, at last, perhaps, is a description of the process that led to discovering how to make a pleasant beverage from a coffee plant.

Save your money; pay with cash.

Put your plastic in the trash.

Take no credit; pay your dues.

Earn your interest; it's yours to choose.

The loan man's going to smile as he bites you with the lash.

Save your money; pay with cash.

You can have it here today;

You can have it, but you're going to pay.

You can have it; it ain't yours —

Till you pay them, it's the store's.

Till you pay them with your cash, you can't have it your way.

Save your money; pay with cash.

There used to be a dreamer, never struck me as poor,

He said, "Boy, there ain't no dream that ain't worth working for.

You let them drop it in your lap, it won't taste half as sweet.

You want to get from here to there, boy, use your feet."

And save your money; pay with cash.

Put your plastic in the trash.

Take no credit; pay your dues.

Earn your interest; it's yours to choose.

The loan man's going to smile as he bites you with the lash.

Save your money; pay with cash.

The loan man's got a whip, he's going to bite you with the lash.

Save your money; pay with cash.

All things must pass. Nothing lasts forever.

That is a scary thought when life is going well, and an encouraging word when it isn't.

In the middle of a wonderful experience, the knowledge that all things pass is a reason to savor the moment to its fullest. In the middle of an ordeal, the knowledge that all things pass is a reason for hope and an incentive to endure. There is "a time to mourn and a time to dance"; everything, indeed, has its season.

Sometimes these seasons end suddenly, and sometimes we have time to prepare as best as we can. The only certainty is that it will end. It's a sad fact: Even if we are able to fulfill the vow that "till death do we part," for example, we acknowledge in the vow that we will part one day.

Once bitten by this fact and exposed to the devastating pain of that parting, a person can withdraw and never emerge to share again. I think that's a tragedy; I would not wish a lonely life as a hermit on my loved one after I'm gone. And we each are capable of giving all we have, as long as we live. Life does goes on after loss.

In the meantime, the most important message I can offer is to savor the time while it is happening. Let the knowledge that it will pass encourage you to love and live life with everything you've got.

"I wouldn't miss it for the world."

I heard myself say it and suddenly wondered what the old cliche really means. Why would the world try to stop me from attending an event if I really wanted to be there? Did the world have alternative attractions that might compete for my attention? Under what circumstances would I be forced to say, "I'm sorry, I missed it for the world"?

I was tempted to do a web search for the origins of the phrase, but I had already lost 10-15 minutes that morning to random searches and scrolling on my phone. I wondered if the phone was a metaphor for the world — "I wouldn't miss it for all the doomscrolling I can imagine."

Christians cast the world in a shadow light — there is the pure and good and honest choice, and then there is the worldly one. We sometimes say, "We are not of this world," or "We are in the world, but not of it," and I wondered if there was a connection between those phrases and "I wouldn't miss it for the world."

I know: It's just another way of saying "I don't want to miss this," but now I'll always wonder why the world would want me not to go.

The stream giveth, and the stream taketh away. I recently discovered the TV show Nashville, which had its first run from 2012 to 2018, just in time to also discover that it was leaving Netflix after Monday, Sept. 14.

I finished Season 4 on Sunday night, and I had run out of time to binge Seasons 5 and 6 in their entirety, so I looked at the IMDb ratings and found the top-rated episodes from the final two seasons. I'm a little embarrassed to admit that most of my Monday was devoted to catching eight or nine 42-minute stories including, of course, the series finale.

I am clearly a sucker for stories about writing songs and trying to make a life making music. They built a pile of endearing and not-so-endearing characters and tossed them in a room together. Even though I've now seen the best of those last two seasons, I expect I'll revisit those seasons and all of Nashville when the stream decides to give it back, someday.

Watching all that songwriting magic gave me the itch to pick up my own guitars and see what comes out. But first I need to turn off the television and get some sleep.

I see They are at it again. I take a quick peek at social media, and an old friend is shouting from afar, to anyone who will listen, "How can you see what They are doing and not be frightened?" My answer is that They are doing Their best to scare us.

Whoever They are, it's a given that They are up to no good. We have known each other for a long time and made fond long-ago memories together, and now here They are to destroy everything that made those memories possible. They are insidious in every way, and how could we not be frightened?

My question is: Why do They want us to be scared of each other? Who benefits when we are at each other's throats and frightened to risk living in peace and love with one another? Can we stop long enough to see through this induced hatred and fear and reach out to understand each other?

Rage and fear take a lot of energy, and if we give it a rest, we might find peace in our hearts. Peace is not an absence; it is a fullness. Peace is the default. When we are not quarreling and throwing epithets and stones and bullets at each other, we are buying and selling, and talking and sharing, and playing and working together. Only when the agitators and activists hurl their insults and their anger into the center of things, only then is the peace disturbed. The raging ones have been at it for so long that we forget peace is the default, and we forget that we have more in common than differences. They — whoever They are, and They come at us from all sides — exploit our differences to drive a wedge.

In the fullness of peace is a calm, gentle, patient, kind reality. If there is true fear anywhere, it is the fear in the hearts of these agitators that they might lose control of their narratives and we will stop being afraid of each other.

"How can I not be frightened?" Oh, sometimes I am frightened, because I can see the fear that grows when these manufacturers of fear relentlessly bang the drum that demands we be terrified of The Other. You know the word for those who want us afraid, don't you? Terrorist. I am wary of those who worship at this altar of Fear and Rage and Anger, but if I yield to the impulse to be terrified, then the terrorists have won and they will rule the day.

No, my choice every morning and, as much as I can manage, every moment, is to love and live in peace with everyone I meet. When we find ourselves at the precipice and about to jump into the pit of fear and rage, let us talk each other down from the ledge and seek understanding in a spirit of love. Let us love and laugh and reason together until the fear mongers give up in frustration.