Guest Book

Yeah, what IS wrong with Allmanned today? Sheesh. Healing vibes to all that need them. Lots of those flying around lately, but luckily for us, they are a natural resource in unlimited supply. 🙂 Bird72, I really liked what you wrote this morning. Good stuff. I was having coffee with a friend recently and he asked if I was a religious person. I am, but generally keep to myself about it, as I feel that everyone should embrace spirituality in their own time and on their own terms. Apparently I did such a good job of keeping to myself that he didn't even know that I belonged to a church or anything! So I said that yes, I was a religious person, and I told him some of the things that I believe and some of the things that I don't believe. I also stressed that my beliefs are organic and dynamic, and that while there were a few bedrock truths that I didn't see ever changing, most of it was a process, a journey, a walk, or what have you, that would be ongoing for the rest of my life. So of course I asked Chris (my friend) why he had asked me that question, and in such an out of the blue way at that. He said that he had a lot of turmoil and upheaval in his personal life, some of which I knew about and some of which I didn't. His wife left him and took their two daughters back to California to live. His career was in a shambles. His father was dying, and he was estranged from his mother. Lots of the usual stuff that people go through, I suppose. And he was wondering if religion might be helpful to him while enduring these various hardships. So here is what I said to him, and I'll post it here, for what it is worth. These are all merely my own thoughts, and I apologize in advance if they offend anyone. I offer them only as one man's perspective in relation to the hard times that so many of our brothers and sisters here in the Mushroom Nation have been experiencing of late. I said that faith in God--and for our purposes here, I'll borrow the Alcoholics Anonymous line about God "as you have come to know him or her"--could be a wonderful thing, and that it could make a positive impact in anyone's life. But I also said that, in my opinion at least, we still have to live our lives in the world as we know it, with all of its ups and downs, triumphs and heartbreaks, inescapable truths and inexplicable mysteries. God will not cut your grass. He will not help your hockey team win. He won't intervene and make your wife and children come back to you. And unfortunately, He won't stop people from suffering and dying. But I do feel in my heart and soul that faith in the God of one's choice can bring a great deal of strength, courage, confidence, peace of mind and serenity into the heart and soul of anyone who merely makes a serious effort to seek it out. I feel that turning to religion as an "answer" to life's problems and concerns is a faulty approach. God doesn't make anything better or worse. I don't feel that He owes me any breaks or special considerations. I do believe that He put me here, and that is why I am grateful to Him and try as best I can to live my life as an exercise in attempting to learn His purpose for me. I do the best that I can with both of these, and like everyone else, I have my good days and bad days. When I pray, I pray for the world and all of the people that share it with me. Yes, I even pray for the bad ones. I believe that it is God's job to judge them, not mine. I pray that my fellow human beings will find what they are looking for in life, whatever that might be. I pray that those who are experiencing difficulties of any kind will perhaps know the inner peace of a lightened load, if even for a moment. Sometimes that is enough. I feel that at any given time, there are literally billions of people on this Earth that need God's comfort more than I do. So I don't pray for me, I pray for them. I hope that during my own trials and tribulations, some of this will come back around to me, that somewhere, someone will be praying for the needs of others, and that maybe a little bit of that good stuff will find its way into my soul. Like Tony said, positive vibes and prayers are an everyday thing. Rest assured that even if nobody here is asking for our thoughts, someone somewhere needs them. And they'll need them tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that. And someday each and every one of us will need them. We need each other to survive and prosper in this life, both literally and figuratively. I'll close with a joke. What did the Dalai Lama say to the New York City hot dog vendor? "Make me one with everything." EAPFP .