THE GREATEST ADVENTURE -- EVER! IMPORTANT
Dear friends, Jinhua, that is Jeannie, wrote a root article titled "Do not do to others what you don't wish them to do to you." It is an excellent article. The discussion is interesting, too. It's well worth reading.
Canuck replied and mentioned to Tim that my life-long chronic respiratory problems are linked to pollution from steel mills. Tim replied with warm regret, and
mentioned that he thinks I will not live as long as I should because of it. He
spoke most lovingly of me, and for that I thank him. But I want to
say something very important about what one might call "the disaster" that happened to me in my childhood. I think that I won't die too young because of some other things that also happened as a result of this respiratory and immune damage
. This post properly belongs as a reply post under Jeannie's root article, but
I think it is too important to bury there so I'm posting it as aroot post.
Dear Tim and David,
Well now guys, before you get too sorry for me, let me tell you that "every cloud has a silver lining."
My silver lining is that I had to entertain myself as I lay in bed trying to
recover from recurrent chest infections. Therefore I became an inveterate reader. I read Gone With the Wind eight times by the time I was 14. Reading is the
route to any kind of knowledge you want. It's also great entertainment.
I also therefore, became a thinker, and began to search for solutions to the problems of greed, power, hunger and want and an end of war, because of things my father told me and also because I was horrified as a child during WWII by the description of young men as "cannon fodder".
These concerns led me at 15 to membership in a certain democratic socialist political party. I held responsible office, worked and watched things carefully, and eventually concluded that the solutions weren't there, because I saw people who wanted to grow with the party, and because I couldn't get a party youth group
that I founded to work together in unity. Too many egos. I concluded that the
solution to overcoming war and want and stuff had to be something that has proven that it can change hearts. Religion has that power. It can even turn people
willingly against their own best interests. I decided that the solution was in
religion. And it had to be able to remotivate people in the present day. I wasn
't interested in good stories and past history. So I started to search by reading. I decided that what I found had to make sense to my common sense and also rest well with science. As I read I discarded religions and philosophies, one after the other, as they expected me to swallow fanciful thinking, or hadn't worked for a thousand years or were great with words but not with action. Finally I
found the Baha'i Faith and I've been a Baha'i ever since because it fit my criteria then and now, and I've never been disappointed. So the Faith was one of the
great gifts I received from my respiratory problems -- time and the will to think and search.
Another great gift was the chance to stay home with my children until even the youngest was well-grown at 14 years old, and the others were all well-launched.
Children need careful, loving guidance and training. Thankfully, although I often felt ill and looked a mess, I put my available energy into raising ourchildren every day, all day, by myself while Ben was at work. He was a caringand manly husband and father, and I did my best. We were really quite poor formany years. If I had been well, would I have found it necessary to get a job?
Since I couldn't hold a job anyway, I got to stay home -- and all our children and now the grandchildren all show the results.
The older you get, they say, the more you see that what has been in your life needed to be there. Nothing else would have worked half so well. Even now, the reason Ben and I go on ships is for the ocean air. We don't go to polluted cities. That has the effect of keeping Ben's lungs safe too.
Then there is another "blessing" from the damage I suffered. That is that I realized I had full power over just one thing that might be able to help
me, and I've spent years on it. That is nutrition. Healthful food, in particular. We never had junk food in the house and we didn't have the money to buy it.
We bought good whole grain bread. Fresh local fruit and vegetables, and so on
. I was interested in vitamins and other kinds of nutrients even 45 years ago.
That meant that not only I, but Ben and all our kids and grandkids are well-nourished and healthy, because our kids, their parents, learned to like to eat what
seemed to some to be spartan food, but was very healthful.
So -- never underrate your tests and difficulties. You are right that our leaders should apply themselves to mitigating pollution --and I assure you -- NOWTHEY WILL! People all over the world are experiencing things they've never seenbefore, and they're scared. The heat is on under the pot, and the pop-corn inside (that's all of us in the world,) are beginning to start to pop as it increases. Slowly at first, but faster and faster, until the whole pot will be full of
freshly popped pop-corn. Except for a few damaged and incapable corns left forgotten in the bottom.
That's what I see as happening right now in our world. The heat's on. Many scary things are coming together, converging toward a single point. How much longer
do you think they are going to play around with war and waste and stuff as they
realize how dire that point of convergence is likely to be.
The ones who think that it will all end with "the return of Christ" or of "the Mahdi" are going to get a great surprise when nothing turns out the
way they so confidently predict and they find themselves in the cooking pot withall the rest of us! Those predictions about the Return as not literal. That's
where they've made their mistake. Anyway, there isn't going to be any "Rapture"
where people vanish as they are taken up and away from all this stuff happening
down here on earth to the rest of us.
So stay tuned for great changes coming from your governments and your neighboursand all the rest of the world, as the pot gets hotter and they all keep waking up.
Don't be scared. It's the greatest adventure in history. Be ready to be part of the solutions that you can't even see yet. It's an ADVENTURE friends! Andone of the things to cling to is that this world isn't made in a random manner.
Things make sense and happen for reasons. There is order in life; and when youare old enough you'll be able to look back, as I do now, and have described here
, and you will say that it all makes sense. It was hard, but it was necessary.
You will see the silver lining in your own dark clouds. Courage.
Commitment to life and the good. Determination. Hope. Love for each other.
That's what we need right now.
With my affection for you two, and all of you. Love, Mary
|
轻松英语