An Amalgam Of Courses

SAT., APR. 20, 1996, 8:16 AM
AIRPORT, ATLANTA

Over the years of your teaching career you have developed or inherited certain courses that now are rather clearly “yours”. This began with International Health, when you were a young assistant professor at Stanford. You have been able to carry that on here, and you are sorry that you accepted the cancellation of that experience this year.

Your developed interest in alcohol, and then other drugs, logically translated into a course when you came to Southern (after a senior seminar at Stanford). Finally you have claimed that as “yours”, and you really have no rivals for it, despite its popularity. Death education was a new area of interest for you, and your course began rather early in the evolution of this as a legitimate course and area of interest for your field, as well as several others.

You inherited the environment course after you had moved to the Farm and were becoming interested in this as an important dimension of health, apart from the personal. In a sense you have “lived” at least some aspects of each of these courses, rather than just teaching about them. You imagine that it would be harder to have a “feel” for environmental issues if you lived in an urban apartment.

Your ecological perspective on health developed out of these teaching experiences, and as it flowered it guided your thinking in further commitment to each of these course offerings.

Increasingly you are seeing interrelationships among these seemingly disparate subjects. You went on to originate the Wellsprings model, and this helps in seeing the interrelationships. This morning, with background noise galore, let Me help you perceive these interactions more clearly. You’ll surely recognize some emphases I already have pressed upon you.

Let’s begin with the world’s human population, a focus in the environmental course. Its growth is not yet catastrophic, but I do see its destructive effects on other forms of life and on some aspects of the physical earth. Fundamental to population growth, obviously, are conceptions and births. There are attempts to diminish these beginnings of life, and these have been somewhat successful. The other fundamental is death, and, particularly in the developed countries, there are many efforts to extend life, by medical means, and to postpone death. When deaths don’t occur the population increases, and environmental deterioration increases.

Thus, I say to you, noting that many would question or deny that the Holy Spirit could be so “anti-human”, that there must needs be more acceptance of bodily death, led by those whose perspectives include the spiritual, the supernatural, and everlasting life. More deaths will help stabilize the population. A non-expanding population allows for more sustainable ecological balancing.

A view of the world, as in international health, tells how important this combination of discouraging conceptions and accepting death is. China, a country with no dominant faith in Me, is trying hard to restrict births and to prolong lives mainly by non-technological means. Other countries are less willing to take the necessary measures, and may well see deterioration that, in itself, will diminish numbers.