Once upon a time there was a train. On this train were many passengers coming and going about their business. Some were reading their newspapers; some where furtively ‘people watching’; some where just looking out the windows at the scenery passing by.
Then a man got on the train. A man with his three little kids.
Soon it became apparent that his children were not very well behaved. They ran all over the train car, poking at the riders’ newspapers; stepping on peoples’ toes; screaming and yelling, and chasing each other all around the passenger car. To put it mildly, they were being very disruptive to all the other passengers.
The children’s father wasn’t paying any attention to his children, nor did he try to stop them from their trouble-making antics. In fact, the father was doing nothing but looking out his window – oblivious to all that was going on.
All the riders in the railway car were becoming more and more annoyed and irritated because of this fathers’ unruly children and because of the father’s unwillingness to even make an attempt to calm them down.
Finally, someone got up the nerve to speak to the father.
Sir, you must know that your children are greatly bothering all the other passengers here. Aren’t you
going to even try to settle them down?!”
The father replied;
I’m so sorry. But I just lost my wife to cancer today,
and my children are trying to deal with the idea that
they no longer have a mother.
* * * * *
You have just experienced a ‘Paradigm Shift’.
* * * * *
Here’s another good example of a paradigm shift.
Climbing Out Of The Well 
Yes, the shifting of a paradigm can be a moment in life akin to a miracle. Two weeks ago, the choir in my church lost our beloved choir director/music director. When she went into her evaluation session with our interim priest, she had mixed feelings about whether she wanted to continue in the job; when she left the session, she had resigned. Why did she resign? Because the priest, grieving his father’s recent death, had lost control and raged so violently at her that she was afraid for her physical safety. Thus, she resigned.
Our choir director told each of us personally what she had decided. She was professional about it and led us to believe that her resignation was based upon her busy life as mother of special needs children and the stress of running a farm–she needed more time for her family. As days went by, however, those of us in the choir learned the whole story, and we entered into the grief process, a huge part of which consisted of intense anger at the priest for what he had done to her.
Two weeks ago, the choir met with the priest. He admitted that he had lost it with our choir director and that he had raged at her to the point where he had become scary, and he gave us a chance to vent our outrage at him. And then came the shift, the miracle: One of us stood up and said, “The damage has been done. That fact won’t change. However, now it’s time for us as a choir to take the responsibility to do damage control and do our best to keep a horrible event from becoming even more horrible and doing even more damage.”
Thus, each of us in the choir has agreed that the choir as a whole will act in the stead of a music director until a new priest comes and hires a music director. One of us is choosing the hymns for the next two months, two choir members are trying to select easy anthems to sing and also determine the date for our first practice of the year, two choir members have volunteered to accompany the hymns each Sunday, and other choir members will help where they are needed. When we have our first practice at the end of August, we will miss our director so much! But we know, thanks to what she taught us, that we can carry on until a new director comes on board.
I know that I could easily have decided to walk out of that meeting and out of that church and never look back. That was what I felt like doing. Others in the choir had expressed the same intentions to me. But none of us did that. We all were of the same mind at the same moment and agreed that staying the course was the right thing to do. And it IS the right thing to do! People in the congregation who have never spoken to me before offered me rides to church this morning and let me know that they supported our choir’s efforts. So now we soldier on until a new music director is hired, but we all know that that this is the way things are supposed to be–until the paradigm shifts again.
So I’m a firm believer in paradigm shifts of the miraculous kind.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thanks for sharing such a heart story. I can certainly see the paradigm in it. You went from loosing it – to finding it. And it sounds like it made you stronger as a result too. I love these shifts when they happen. They open our minds to God I think. He works this way. Tries to open our eyes to new possibilities all the time. These shifts – these 3 dimensional life lessons – transform us like nothing or nobody else can. They transform our thinking so that we become better and better people – and more like Jesus.
LikeLiked by 1 person