Sabbath Messages > Sabbath Message: April 22, 2006
Good Sabbath
April 22, 2006
We just love our Fridays; we got through another week and the weekend is made for the freedom it allows. Mondays, ugly, even though they lend us a chance for ambition and work ethic to propel us for at least 5 days. When you deal with young people, just completing their college educations, you observe a newer generation's values. They have to complete college, get jobs, earn enough money to pay off what they borrowed in order to afford higher education. I love the energy they can summon, the innocence with which they are endowed.
All youth is born into Eden, where God has laid out the potential of maturity and accomplishment: to feed the poor, to comfort the afflicted, to earn wisdom and perspective. Yet so much of youth is wasted time and possibilities. It is well that they gain maturity without political chicanery, and love of God through emulation. We are born half angel and half brute and the battle is for always, but particularly choice-ridden, during youth's formative times.
The toughest times are when youth becomes parent, when, having just survived its own foolishness, is expected to have gained maturity and perspective. The truth is that it is a time of giving attention and time to important matters, like surviving, like learning about love and like, like developing ethics and morality, like smiling when hurting, and laughing instead of weeping.
"Great people are the commissioned guides of humankind, who rule their fellows because they are wiser." (Carlyle)
"If any man seeks for greatness, let him forget greatness and ask for truth, and he will find both." (Horace Mann)
Our ancient teachers expressed it in the doctrine of free will, which is based upon the fact that there can be no responsibility without freedom and no freedom without responsibility, whether America or Iraq. Devotion to a god of thunder and vengeance builds neither freedom nor responsibility, for it pillages the souls of those seeking leaders and destroys that fantastic aroma of liberty.
Martin Luther King said: "We must learn to live together as brothers, or we will all perish as fools" and that time is fast arriving—pay attention!
I often think of Tally and his great wife, Lillian. He was a minister and taught life and ethical behavior to all of us who became his friends and flock. Now, as his illness takes on the form of incurability and God guides him from the now into the forever, his loving partner fights not to break into tears when asked about him. I have found that people can act as true Angels when they shed tears, for that is true holy water, when we weep for that which we love, whether the thought of losing it or concentrating everything on making certain that those we love, know it, for that is a joy borrowed directly from a kind God. It is we who connect it with our reality.
Love with depth those who need your love; may the tears you do share, never be wasted on sorrow. Love is the celebration of those we love and need and miss. Memory is forever!
sandy
