Course Corrections Become Constant Necessities

by

Christy Thomas

Special to United Methodist Insight | June 5, 2025

For most of hominoid existence, we lived in small bands, constantly moving around, working in reasonable harmony with the surrounding plant and animal life, never “owning” the land or the resources within or under it.

That slowly began to change with the advent of planned agriculture, which provided, for the first time, an actual surplus of food. People, freed from the daily need to go out and find what would sustain them until the next day, began to develop new skills and create new ways to interact with the world around them.

Now, several thousand years later, we humans are likely the most invasive and most destructive species ever seen in the complex history of this planet. We have the capacity to kill massive numbers of people and destroy entire nations with the punch of just a few buttons, held in the hands of ever-capricious, ever-power-hungry humans. Nothing is truly safe from those with evil intent and/or lacking the capacity for self-restraint.

I do not doubt that we will eventually wipe out life as it is presently known and poison the air and earth for eons until, perhaps, it eventually heals and can support life again.

So what does this mean to me, as a tiny piece in this interconnected world?

Two intertwined values keep surfacing in my brain: kindness and integrity. I need to be true to myself, and that means consistently re-evaluating how my actions are impacting both my soul and the lives and souls of those around me. Course corrections become constant necessities.

I also need to show kindness, mercy, and grace to myself and then to as many as I can around me for as long as I can. Only in this way can I see a reasonable way through the world that is generally self-centered and self-focused.

Kindness to myself also means embracing the need for self-protection when necessary. The challenge, always, involves holding onto integrity while enforcing my own, to use a trendy term, boundaries.

Faithfulness to both kindness and integrity demands significant self-restraint, a notion that appears to be in steep decline. I can only hope that such values will see a resurgence, or that the inevitable doomsday will appear far sooner than necessary.

We are all in this together. When we can’t make room for one another, offering the same grace we long to receive from them, we doom ourselves.

This essay is excerpted from "Christy Thomas: Pondering Life, Old Age, and a Crazy World" on Substack. The Rev. Dr. Christy Thomas is a retired clergy member of the former North Texas Annual Conference, now the Horizon Texas Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church. Click here to subscribe to Dr. Thomas' blog.