Our gifts, talents and life pursuits can become bobbleheads and big hands. They can grow too large, create disproportion, and lead us to life out of balance.

In the movie, “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” (the old one with the terrible special effects and a tragic absence of Johnny Depp), the lucky children who tour Willy Wonka’s candy factory visit various departments of the production facility. Confections abound, including, but certainly not limited to, gummy bears larger than bowling balls.

At one juncture, they enter a room of brightly colored wallpaper depicting vivid fruit. Wonka tells the children to lick the wallpaper because the “Strawberries really taste like strawberries, and the snozzberries really taste like snozzberries.” The children all stare agape as he describes this delicacy, until he mentions the snozzberries. The trance breaks. One particularly disbelieving youth declares, “There’s no such thing as a snozzberry.”

In the deserts of Africa, little vegetation grows. A harsh climate of arid conditions and sweltering temperatures makes survival nearly impossible for anything other than some scraggly shrubbery.

Yet, in this veritable wasteland, a species of tree does manage to eek out an existence: the Manketti tree. These trees grow strong and enduring across the windswept savannas of Chad, Mali, Niger and Uganda. They spread their far-reaching limbs that produce white flowering blooms and mongongo nut, one of the most essential nuts of socioeconomic and nutritive importance in that region of Africa.

Beyond the visible portion of the tree -- the stout trunk and widely splayed limbs -- the sustainability of the Manketti exists in the extent of its root system. Unlike many trees in more kind and lush climates, the Manketti’s root system does not extend to occupy a vast surface area. Instead, it grows one long taproot that plunges deep into the earth until it reaches water. When drought persists, the tree still survives.

We want it all. We want it now.

We have never been good at waiting. We like things quickly, and we realize that we are textbook examples of the American ideal of instant gratification and fast food satisfaction. The glorious finale appeals to us so much more than the tedious process. And yet the process cannot be eliminated, and growth takes time. We’ve learned the hard way.

In second grade we embarked on the exciting science “adventure” (I think our teacher deemed this experiment as an “adventure,” thinking that the perilously enticing name would convince us energetic eight-year-olds that botany was fun rather than brainy). We would plant our own seeds and watch them grow. And so we buried the seeds of infinite possibility in rich, black soil, watered appropriately and waited for the blooms.

In this life, we save for a later date.  We put the products of our time and our labor in some box for safekeeping. We call those boxes 401(k)s, pensions or Social Security. We put away the fruits of our efforts for a day when we’ll need them. They are our fortune, waiting for our arrival at that future date.

Jesus told his followers to store treasure in heaven. Invest there. Have an IRA upon your arrival. Heaven’s banks, he said, are more secure than Swiss accounts.

 

Some people live in an esoteric thought-world that has little take-away value. What these people discuss rarely translates into something practical, something we can employ in our own lives. These people never explain the complex in simple terms.

 

A  few people I know, however, have the gift of making the apparently complex understandable and livable. Jeremy being one of these, I called him.