Public Health, Yet Again

MON., OCT. 19, 1987, 7:08 AM
MONTELEONE, NEW ORLEANS

Here you are, ready to start a full day of meetings and activity, all focused, in some way, on public health. You remember that I offered you a Teaching with this basic title a year ago at this convention. You don’t remember the specifics of those words, so let’s see how similar and how different they turn out to be. It is good that you have set this time for Me and My communication with you, o son. Hear further.

The public health movement is an important part of your civilization. Why? Because it represents a concern for human life and for the quality of life… in persons and in communities. In symbol form it is people being taxed in order that some with particular skills might manipulate the environment and do some things to people so that there is less sickness, illness, and disability in the community. And, of course, part of that range of services and activities is education, so that people might be more knowledgeable about and more motivated toward better health for themselves and those with whom they share a region. The extent of the services will vary with the technological capacities of the culture and with the extent to which the people will be taxed.

Public health is best (for it is an holistic institution) when it is embued with a spirit of service… even when this spirit is empowered by a relationship with Me. It will be rare that any entire department will be equally committed to Me and see their work as dedicated to Me, but even a few within any unit can increase the quality of service.

I’m sure you realize, and this saddens Me even as I accept its reality, that this spirit of service does not correlate perfectly with church membership, even activity. For some, happily, the enrichment of spirit that comes from a Sunday worship and further keeping of the Sabbath carries over fully into the work week. In appreciation for what I have done, such people work in a spirit of service, and what they do is often transformed in mystical ways to be more effective than it would have been without such commitment. Others seem to leave their piety in the pews, and their attitude toward work is relatively unaffected by anything they’ve heard or done in worship and study.

And, of course, there are some who are not church goers, but who have a relationship with Me in some unique way, who do dedicated work with a sense of spirit, even if it is rather unfocused. A few even deny Me but still have great concern for their fellow humans. Many of these I reach through their own sense of self, and even as they attest that their strength comes only from within, it is influenced by Me. Many are the ways in which I work.

Public health tends to focus on problems. Your culture is awesome in its capacity to define problems, so public health has little concern about not staying busy. While each of the problems that a public health program addresses has reality, it also can be seen just as a condition of interaction between and among different part of My creation. In this present time human life flourishes, while other forms of life decline. In time this shall be balanced, and human life shall decline, in spite of public health measures and efforts, while other forms of life shall increase. In My view the public health will not be worse… just different.