Elbow Ease?

Most of us know the meaning of the expression elbow grease. Hard work and effort to achieve a goal we’ve set for ourselves. Blood, sweat, and tears in service to a project or cause we love. Hours of overtime dedicated to completing an assignment or job before a deadline. Once upon a time, the image the expression would conjure up is of someone with a soapy brush in hand laboring to scrub a kitchen floor. Yup, that takes some elbow grease.

And we’ve probably experienced the need for elbow room. Seated on a crowded plane or bus or elevator, or at a movie theater or concert venue waiting for the doors to open, we sometimes prefer that the bodies closest to us weren’t quite so close. We feel cramped and crowded. We might even think we’re suffocating. When our need for elbow room gets the better of us, we consider nudging or shoving a little in hopes of some shift that would bring relief. We could find ourselves saying something in our out loud voice politely (or not), “A little elbow room over here!”

But what would the world be like if we came up with elbow ease? Space for every person. Physical room, yes, but also emotional and psychological space in which each person felt safe, accepted, welcome, at ease. A framework for life that views life not as a commodity but as a gift, not as a resource to consume but as a treasure to be valued. And how wonderful it would be if it could all happen without excruciating effort, hard labor, painful sacrifice, soapy chemicals and hours on our knees. Elbow ease is a fabrication, of course, a dream, a hope, a desire which isn’t likely to come into existence any time soon.

And yet, if each and every human being didn’t feel it necessary to vie for the space to be, to compete for essential resources to survive, to scrape and scratch and scramble in panic and anxiety through the hours in all the days of all the weeks… would we all breathe a bit more deeply and celebrate a bit more joyfully and open a bit more fully to one another and to our own unique potential by finding confidence in occupying space on this spinning planet?

Albert Einstein developed the theory of relativity asserting that energy and mass are interchangeable when the speed of light gets involved. Maybe it’s time we discover a new way of relating that fosters interdependence by honoring each person’s creative energy and respecting every person’s physical mass. Much more than our elbows would enjoy the ease if the light of grace got involved in our space.

Written by Rev. Rebecca Taylor, Pastor, without AI getting involved