An Update… On Life

MON., NOV. 30, 1998, 5:55 AM
FARM, STUDY

Yes, o son, I realize that My last Teaching for you was on that last day in Hawaii. After some hassle in the airport area you had a good visit with Eloise and then an uneventful flight home. You then needed one long night of sleep, after Thanksgiving dinner with son John Patrick and family. Now you are once again composing a newsletter for the church, then you’ll send off a couple of Thank You cards, write up the Session minutes, and life will be back into a familiar, barely stressful mode.

The balance of your life while visiting on that faraway island was about right, though I experienced you struggling with involvement vs. non-engagement. You were quite faithful in hearing from Me… and you did find a store of “Our paper”!… but it has been a bit too long in reestablishing My counsel to you. Your desk and this study are as messy as usual, but you did respond to My “wake-up call”.

It is now the holiday season, so it will not be possible for you to settle into a comfortable rhythm of life until this has been experienced, yet again. You have the “assignment” from Me to “clean up this place”, and you have started this big task in a small way. It needn’t be as neat and trimmed as Howard and Joanne’s place, with the Japanese “team”, but the clutter on the Waianae coast was your goad to do a pre-winter clean-up here… as soon as these writing tasks have been completed.

For I want your life to settle into an easy balance of a few regular responsibilities with time to muse and contemplate. Oh, of course you do have a Ruminations to compose, and appropriately, it shall be on a previous trip to Hawaii, merged with this more recent one. I’ll push you to have it in the mail by early in the new year. Though you always enjoyed “last classes” in a semester, you don’t miss these now, and you certainly don’t yearn for the task of reading and grading finals and deciding on grades in this term-ending time. The “things you must do” are certainly less now, but are sufficient to require balancing, from time to time.

You should look forward to this winter season as a time to read, contemplate, and write, some. A post-Christmas – pre-Easter letter about your life now would be welcomed by many of those who would receive it. Part of the good-to-acceptable balance you worked out in Hawaii was the re-reading of previous Teachings. These are your special, best source of perspective on life, as you have lived it – as a fine aid to living it now and on into your future, here on earth.

You, and your fellow humans, will soon be into the last year of this millennium, as most of you count time, rationally. Some of the projections are that the transition will be a time of chaos, not because of satan and his supposed power to thwart My desires for peace on earth, but because of a decision made nearly half a century ago… concerning linear vs. circular. I see this as a symbol of two views of life, and as they “clash” your mighty computer system may malfunction or shut down.

Your standard, secular way of looking at life is linear: You have lived since a late May day in 1926, so you are 72 and into your 73rd year of life. Your Dad is 95 and into his 96th year of consecutive life. The scary projection is that computers will not “know” how to go from 99 to 00… what this means. For, you see, it is forcing a circular interpretation, since the linear one “doesn’t work”.