“It promises to be another beautiful day on the Outer Cape…”

As I awake on this beautiful Monday, I think about all the various promises in our lives. Some are God’s promises; the promise of a new day, or the promise of a rainbow. Some are very big human promises; promises to uphold the constitution, promises to have and to hold in sickness and in health. These are important promises to be kept that too often people break. There are other big promises that may never be fulfilled, but are important ones, the ones of hopes and dreams; the vacation in Paris, or “next year in Jerusalem”. There are even those promises that are huge to some and seemingly inconsequential to others, like the promise of going to the lighthouse if the weather is fine in the beginning of Virginia Woolf’s novel, “To The Lighthouse”.

Yet within each promise of a new day are many small promises, like the promise of a fresh cup of coffee. These are the promises I would like to think about this morning. One friend of mine has a child fighting mental illness. Their life is made up of little promises. “Would you like me to bring home some ice cream for you from the grocery store?” There are implicit promises built into this; a promise of a mother to return with a treat, and a promise of the child to hold things together while she is gone.

Recently, there have been a lot of stories about suicides in the news. I don’t know how much this is a result of the economic woes so many are struggling with, but the promises the mother evokes from her child has made me think much more seriously about not only the big promises, but also the little promises. When I tell my wife and daughter that I’ll be back from the store in an hour, it is a small promise that is part of the much larger promises. We might all be a little better off if we thought about our promises that way.

For over a year, I’ve been writing a blog post every day. Some are very short, like a Wordless Wednesday post. Others require much time and thinking. I don’t want to make a promise to update my blog every day, even though I generally manage to succeed with this, but I do promise to update my blog frequently, even if the frequency falls off a little during vacations. I make the same sort of promise about visiting friends’ blogs.

How do you think about your promises? If you are a fellow blogger, are their promises implied or stated about your blog? Do you have implied or stated promises in reading other people’s blogs or commenting on them? Are you viewing your promise to take out the trash as an important part of the promise, ‘to have and to hold’? Do you view each of these promises as an important part of God’s promise of each new day?

For me, the promise right now is to let Kim sleep a little this morning. It will be followed by fulfilling the promise of going to the beach to swim, and at some point over the days to come, the promise to write more about these experiences on the Cape.