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Have you ever pushed the pause button on your life for a few minutes and asked yourself a question?

Next time you decide to do this, ask yourself: What am I looking for?

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Everyone spends their lives searching for things: money, relationships, meaning. Believe it or not, most people (unlike Bono), at some point in their life, will find what they are looking for. So why is there so much unhappiness in the world?

Because most of us spend the majority of our lives looking for something we don’t actually want.

Financial security. That next promotion. A bigger house. Relationships with people we can control. Retirement.

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We had some friends in Florida, when we lived there a million years ago, whose dog ate the husband’s wedding band. They had a messy search on their hands, following the dog around the yard, retrieving its excrement, picking through it. But they were persistent, and the dog eventually passed the ring.

Are you willing to dig through the excrement of life to find that which is most important to you?

* * * * *

The other night a seemingly random question came into my mind: What is the first thing that Jesus said?

It struck me that this thing might be important, and as I happened to be reading the book of John, I opened it and began scanning through. John opens the book with his monologue on The Word, then introduces John the Baptist. Then Jesus comes on the scene. The first thing he says?

“What do you seek?”

What are you seeking? Before you spend your entire life in the pursuit of that particular thing, make sure it’s something worth finding. I’d hate to spend my life picking through dog poop only to find a cat-shaped Silly Band, or the the lego head of Darth Vader.

The man kept walking by our tent at the Frederick Fair, usually at a leisurely pace. His wife Susie was bubbly, friendly and talkative. But Jim often passed with his eyes to the ground, pushing a dolly loaded down with sugar or ice. When he did stop to say hello, it was in a melancholy tone.

He and his wife operated a kettle corn stand just up the midway from us – the best kettle corn I’d ever had. They also made a mean shaved ice. As the years passed I found myself enjoying Susie’s company, but around Jim I felt uneasy. He always seemed a little distant or removed.

Do you know someone like this? Someone who doesn’t respond in a way that makes you feel comfortable? Do you give them the benefit of the doubt, or do you make snap judgments on their character based solely on surface level interaction?

I’m terrible at this.

That person’s not nice – they rarely say hello.

Don’t they like me? Hmmm. Maybe I should just try to avoid them.

As our years passed at the Frederick Fair, we got to know Jim and Susie better and better. Frederick Fair is a funny place – you don’t see folks all year, but when you all come back in September, everyone feels like old friends.

Then, one year, I found out that Jim’s daughter had been murdered years before, in the fall of 2002, just after the fair.

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle – Plato

One year ago Jim was kind enough to come over and buy one of my books, Think No Evil. The story of the Nickel Mines Amish shooting. We talked for a long time about his daughter, how he felt about it, how he dealt with it. Last winter Jim and Susie took me into their home in Florida, where Susie stuffed me with all kinds of delicious food and Jim was generous enough to tell me the story of his daughter Jeni. We’re working on including it in another book on the topic of forgiveness.

When you talk to someone about the most difficult things they’ve been through in life, friendship comes so much easier.

Fast forward to this year at the fair. Jim and Susie still ran their kettle corn / shave ice stand across from us. Each night as we closed up our respective tents we’d chat about how business was, how ridiculous the heat wave, how glad we were that another day at the fair was over. Then, on Saturday night, the final night of the fair, I walked over to say good-bye, at least for another year.

“You know,” Susie said, her eyes filling with tears for a split second, “tomorrow it’ll be 8 years since Jeni…” her voice trailed off.

Jim cleared his throat, and one of his classic smiles, filled with a little sadness, eased on to his face.

“You just gotta keep driving,” he said, looking at me, then at the ground (you’ll have to read the book to understand the significance of that phrase).

The three of us stood there quietly for a moment. A cool breeze swept through what had been an otherwise hot week. We hugged, chatted a little more, hugged again.

There are unlikely friendships waiting for you, if you will only stop long enough to hear the story.

A huge thanks to Jim and Susie, for their willingness to include me and my family in their story – if you guys are reading today, the entire Smucker family loves and appreciates you a lot. As for our rallying cry…next year in Frederick!

Have you ever read something and thought, “Wow, that person has just seen right into my soul?”

This happened to me yesterday, when Maile read a portion of Roald Dahl’s “Boy: Tales of Childhood.” She just finished reading it to our kids.  This is the portion that caught my attention.

“I enjoyed [working for a company], I really did. I began to realize how simple life could be if one had a regular routine to follow with fixed hours and a fixed salary and very little original thinking to do. The life of a writer is absolute hell compared with the life of a businessman. The writer has to force himself to work. He has to make his own hours and if he doesn’t go to his desk at all there is nobody to scold him. If he is a writer of fiction he lives in a world of fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not. Two hours of writing fiction leaves this particular writer absolutely drained. For those two hours he has been miles away, he has been somewhere else, in a different place with totally different people, and the effort of swimming back into normal surroundings is very great. It is almost a shock. The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it. It happens to be a fact that nearly every writer of fiction in the world drinks more whiskey than is good for him. He does it to give himself faith, hope and courage. A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it.”

It’s been almost a year now that I’ve been writing for a living. Dahl expresses my sentiments exactly.

What is the risk/reward with your vocation? What about it do you love? What about it do you hate?

I wasn’t quite sure what to say when the man walked up and asked if we had seen his bag of candy. It was Sunday morning. The Great Frederick Fair’s last day was Saturday. All we had left to do was gather everything from our 40×40 foot tent, shoehorn it into our trailer and be on our way.

“Did anyone see a bag of candy layin’ around here?” the man asked. “I think I left it here last night.”

He was around 50 years old, wearing one of those mesh baseball caps, an untucked plaid shirt and navy pants that looked like they hadn’t been washed in weeks. His Santa Claus belly overlapped his belt, and he carried an unopened umbrella and some sort of small backpack.

“Sorry, man,” I said. “Someone must have grabbed it last night. We would have seen it this morning, if it was still here.”

He stared at me for a moment.

“You don’t think anyone handed it in at the lost and found, do you?”

I shrugged.

“We haven’t seen it.  But you could always check.”

I gave him directions to the office, all the while thinking to myself, “Seriously? You just came back out to the fairgrounds at 9:00 on a Sunday morning to retrieve a bag of candy?”

He walked away looking very nervous, wringing his hands, limping slightly. I saw him a little later in the day, still wandering the fairgrounds, still looking for his lost bag of candy. He was easily recognizable, not because of his appearance but because of the slow pace at which he traveled – everyone else there was cleaning up, ready to get home, moving at breakneck speed.

But when I saw him a third time, just before we left, a thought stuck in my head: if people care enough about something, they’ll go out at any time of day, any day of the week, to find it.

Then I had another thought, probably because my friend Ryan Dagen and I are planning a new Sunday morning service at our church, starting in January:

What does the church need to do to be perceived as valuable? With church attendance reaching new, all-time lows, what needs to change?

That guy was willing to get out of bed early and drive to the fairgrounds just to find a $2.50 bag of candy because, to him, it was valuable.

How can the church become valuable again?

Before I get into the meat (pun intended) of today’s topic, I’ve got two very important announcements:

1 – We’re still raising money for charity:water. Click HERE to track our progress, or to give.  Maile and I are matching the first $100 in gifts today – just go to the site, donate money, and put “shawnsmucker.com match” in the subject line. 5 minutes of your time and $10 and you’ll be contributing to someone getting clean water who doesn’t currently have it. Seriously. Put down your coffee, click on the link, and give. It couldn’t be easier.

2 – Time is running out for you to register for the upcoming Fireside Writer’s Conference. We’ll be talking with authors, professional social media types, bloggers, professors…all to find out more about the writing process.  Check out all the speakers and topics HERE. Or if you’re not available that weekend, at least go HERE and “like” it. I’ll feel so much better about myself (and you’ll get periodic updates on upcoming classes and other writerly events).

Now on to the most important list of trivial things you’ll ever encounter:

TUESDAY’S TOP 10 – BEST CARNIVAL FOODS OF ALL TIME

Having just returned from the Great Frederick Fair (which I wrote about in yesterday’s post, “My Third Favorite Day of the Year”), I’m going through a cleansing diet of sorts. The following are the top ten culprits, the foods that get me every year:

1. Funnel Cake – this mound of fried dough and powdered sugar always looks insurmountable, but before you know it you’ve eaten every last bite and proceed to lick the paper plate. Little do you know, you’re face is covered with the stuff.

2. Ice Cream – if you’ve read my Top 10 Ice Cream list, you know where my weakness lies

3. Jumbo Turkey Legs – I don’t even like these things, but I do like carrying them around because it makes me feel like Fred Flintstone

4. Fried Oreos – I’ve never even eaten these (yet), but the idea is sooooo carnival

5. Crab Cake Sandwiches – the best crab cake sandwich in the history of the civilized world is made at J.B. Seafood at the Great Frederick Fair. I can’t even talk about it without getting emotional.

6. Cotton Candy – it vanishes in your mouth. What else needs to be said?

7. Candy Apples – I don’t like apples, but I know that the masses will riot if this item is not included

Help me finish my list – what three fair food items am I missing?

Don’t forget to go to charity:water and give.  If you’re in the first $100 of donations today, I’ll match it.