GPS

We were at a rural Catholic church for Uncle Johnny’s funeral. As was the custom, several of the retired priests who had served the parish were invited back for the service. One of them was thumbing his way through a little prayer book. First he went to the right, then he went to the left…all the while my 90-year-old dad sitting beside me was losing his patience. After drumming his hands on the back of the pew, he blurted out, “He can’t find it, he can’t find it.”

Dad was just about to get up and leave the church when I grabbed him by his belt loop and pulled him back down. At last, the priest stopped and read something. Whatever it was, it was anticlimactic following dad’s pronouncement of the obvious. It would have meant more if the priest had closed the book and ad-libbed a prayer.

Over the years, I’ve lost plenty of things…gloves and hats mostly. I always make sure to have some spare items hanging around just in case. I doubt that anyone cares if I’m wearing a brown pair of gloves this morning, only to lose them at lunch and replace them with a black pair in the evening.

But the one thing that we never want to lose is our way. With GPS, it’s easier to find what we are looking for even in a strange town or country. The GPS on my phone works just as well in Brazil as it does in Minnesota. In both places, I can see lakes on my phone that I don’t even see from my car.

But how about when it comes to our career or our family life…a GPS won’t help us there. Or will it? Normally GPS stands for Global Positioning System…but what if it also stood for Glittering Precious Sapphires?

Let me explain. In the 1860s when the southerners and the northerners were engaged in a great Civil War, prospectors were finding gold in the Rocky Mountains of present day Montana. First came the discovery of gold near Bannack, then came gold around Virginia City. The third major find was near present day Helena, the Montana state capitol. The prospectors called it Last Chance Gulch…having already missed out on the two earlier bonanzas. Of course, not all the prospectors got rich at Last Chance Gulch. Some arrived too late, and so they began their journey back to civilization.

However, that didn’t mean they couldn’t continue to look for gold as they retreated out of the Rockies. That’s what happened to a group who traveled east near present-day Lewistown. They panned for gold in the creeks but didn’t find any flecks or nuggets. What they did find were blue pebbles, but they weren’t looking for blue pebbles. They were looking for gold. Then in the 1890s, a cattle rancher collected some pebbles thinking they might be sapphires and sent them to be assayed. Eventually, they made their way to Tiffany’s in New York City where they were proclaimed to be the most precious gem ever discovered in Montana. This is no small feat considering that Montana is known as the Treasure State and Butte is home to the richest hill on earth.

The mining of the precious Yogo sapphires ensued and jewelers considered anything less than a Yogo sapphire to be inferior.

As we journey through life looking for that one perfect nugget, or – in the case of the priest -- a favorite prayer that’s been recited at previous funerals, maybe we should broaden our vision and scope out other precious gems.

When I graduated from college, my goal in life was to be a sports reporter with my heart set on covering the New York Yankees, still my favorite baseball team. I was a sports reporter in high school. But after college, I found more value in using my talents as a communicator in public relations, first for a telephone cooperative in Glendive, Montana, and later for a regional utility in Bismarck, North Dakota. For the last 16 years, I’ve been promoting North Dakota’s lignite coal industry to a variety of audiences.

Had I stuck to my original dream, I might have been like the prospectors who walked away from a stream full of crystal blue sapphires. Instead, I’ve enjoyed a rich career. My hobby remains the New York Yankees. I’ve seen them play at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx and at Steinbrenner Field in Tampa. But my vocation is to promote home-grown energy in North Dakota. My career in public relations has helped me purchase my house, feed my family, send my boys to college and support the occasional vacation to Brazil and Hawaii.

So don’t overlook the sapphires while searching for the gold. And for goodness sake, don’t fumble through the prayer book looking for something that would mean more if it came from the heart and not someone else’s pen. There are glittering precious sapphires…if we will only choose to look.