All About Spirit
Dear Samuel,
I have been writing letters and stories for you and archiving them in the form of this website. I hope this format will be available for you in the future, but if anything happens most of the content of this website, except for the imbedded video and audio recording will be printed and bound into a book for you to read when you are a young man. My letters and stories are a blend of my life as a friend, father, teacher and now a grandfather. In the future I am looking forward to teaming up with your dad and to exploring ways to share a Christian perspective and joy of this life with students on college campuses. I imagine far away places and new horizons as I contemplate these future efforts! It has been wonderful having you with your grandmother and me the past few days. We had a wonderful lunch with a man of God today! I was blessed to be included at a lunch table with your parents and Dr. Charles Foster. Charles was a friend of your great grandfather Dr. Lynn Martin, who also did much good in his lifetime. I am writing this story because you are too young to remember our lunch today and will be too young for a number of years to consider the message in this letter to you. It is my hope that you will be like Lynn and Charles and be a leader in a new age of love and respect that seems lacking in a significant way in 2012. |
There are of course many good stewards of love and respect today and I pay tribute to them and their valiant efforts. I was with three of these people at lunch today. It was so spiritually valuable for me that I want to tell you about how the lunch with your mom and dad and Mr. Foster inspired me. When I finally saw him face to face after fifty some years, I was encouraged in many ways, first by his caring smile, and later by his compassion and genuine care for others. I feel he is a person with energetic, good health and is ninety years young! All of these qualities inspired me to aspire for what he has accomplished! Our conversation was very good for me because Charles told some stories about his memories of my brother Gregg and me and about his sons who were the same age as the Martin brothers. His boys played with us many years ago. Charles made me laugh and smile often when he told stories about our family life back in the 1950's. Then he mentioned the recent passing of one of his sons and I empathized with how he felt, but in a different way because I have not (thank God) lost a child. But I did wish my dad could have been with us at the enjoyable reunion.
Charles is one of the people who also provides financial support to your parents mission work. We discussed my beloved uncle Bill McKinney too and how Charles was the person who helped him get started in his career and I considered the good my dear Uncle has done and I thought about his effort to keep my mother's side of the family together and I felt very blessed!
The discussion was not about Charles but was illuminating with regard to the narrative of his long career with the State of Missouri’s Department of Education. After a retirement in his seventies he returned to work teaching highway patrolmen how to deliver curriculum that constitutes today’s school DARE Program (drug abuse prevention). He served in this way until he was eighty eight years old. Now at age ninety he serves as a counselor, true to his academic training, in the Stephen Ministries Program and also in another program for persons with dementia. I was considering his wonderful life as we drove home, when you dad said that he too felt the life of Charles Foster was the way one is encouraged to live in a scripture he knew that I loved and valued ( Philippians verses 6-9).
Mid-way into the lunch someone tapped me on the shoulder and said "hi Terry", the greeting came from a friend named Gina. Gina and her oldest daughter Ciera were seated at the table behind us. Our friendship began years before when my daughter Jenny played volleyball with Ciera. Some art lessons and the crayons and drawing tablets I brought for the kids too young for volleyball competition, provided enjoyment and maybe a lifelong interest for young Heidi. Ciera and Jenny are in college now and Heidi is in High School. I miss those volleyball years, but it was rewarding that today Gina showed me a picture on her smart phone of Heidi's fine art pieces. It made me very happy and glad I shared some time with Heidi when she was young!
News coverage in the last 48 hours is a constant reminder (if you watch) of violence as profound and tragic as an elementary school shooting. Oh how I pray we can have a better society in the future and have secure and safe schools for you!
The social ability to recognize the emotion someone is feeling that produces rage and violence is needed in the United States and around the world. The mass killings in the news are examples of most extreme negative emotions of mentally ill individuals. In a terrible form of recognition the sick individual gets attention. We as a functional humanity must detect and help those who are suffering from mental illness and so prone to violence.
Charles has dedicated his life to education and he has buried his wife and son, yet like Jobe of the Bible he still loves life, God and his fellow humans. As a committed educator he has applied cognitive empathy and ideas most positive in his service to others. In spite of grief and loss of loved ones he looks to what is lovely, true and just. The wisdom of Philippians 6-9 is the answer to discovering quite strength in an atmosphere of peace.
The hallmark of a society that suffers from a lack of peace is one that devalues human life and is one that is entertained by violence and looks at death in ways that do not respect human life, but cheapen it! We cannot look to ugly, dehumanizing things or be entertained by arts and performances that are dark and primarily about things the opposite of selfless love and still expect to also experience the “peace that surpasses all understanding". The reason for this is as obvious as seeing that oil and water do not mix. a skilled artist knows how to create a beautiful lithograph because of the physical difference of oil and water. In a greater way God can create a person with a beautiful soul, by blending an individual's awareness of past sin with a desire to serve Him and create living art.
Without God in the mix, the soul languishes as unblended unrefined substance that is a murky color at best. But when the murky soul is touch by His spirit beautiful refraction shines like a rainbow. Without this stimulation spiritual substance only reflects the culture it is contained in and resonates in course, crude opposition to the ideals of human dignity.
In cultures of predominately material gain, greed and selfishness can bring about the worst in human behavior, individuals can be made to feel they are worth noting, proper sexual identity for adolescents and the young becomes a struggle, as selfish pleasures spawn things as horrible as human trafficking. Greed and selfishness makes persons who are in darkness, situationally incapable of empathy. Some do not try to imagine being in other person's shoes or being without shoes entirely. But the peace that surpasses all understanding, through selfless love can intuit the emotion of the other person and transform grief and sadness into forms of healing. This form of emotion can internalize and make one feel what they are feeling, in a way taught by the life of Jesus Christ or by a Saint such as Mother Theresa.
The psychopaths who kill and those who hate, and those consumed with material gain for self lack this emotional empathy. The deficits of the persons without empathy, who is primarily narcissistic, can become a plague upon humanity, until the sick society returns to the healing ways advocated in Phillippians 6-9 there will great suffering. God bless teachers like Charles who have continued to shine bright and who teach us to shine bright. May you dear Samuel and your generation know a peace that surpasses all understanding!
Charles is one of the people who also provides financial support to your parents mission work. We discussed my beloved uncle Bill McKinney too and how Charles was the person who helped him get started in his career and I considered the good my dear Uncle has done and I thought about his effort to keep my mother's side of the family together and I felt very blessed!
The discussion was not about Charles but was illuminating with regard to the narrative of his long career with the State of Missouri’s Department of Education. After a retirement in his seventies he returned to work teaching highway patrolmen how to deliver curriculum that constitutes today’s school DARE Program (drug abuse prevention). He served in this way until he was eighty eight years old. Now at age ninety he serves as a counselor, true to his academic training, in the Stephen Ministries Program and also in another program for persons with dementia. I was considering his wonderful life as we drove home, when you dad said that he too felt the life of Charles Foster was the way one is encouraged to live in a scripture he knew that I loved and valued ( Philippians verses 6-9).
Mid-way into the lunch someone tapped me on the shoulder and said "hi Terry", the greeting came from a friend named Gina. Gina and her oldest daughter Ciera were seated at the table behind us. Our friendship began years before when my daughter Jenny played volleyball with Ciera. Some art lessons and the crayons and drawing tablets I brought for the kids too young for volleyball competition, provided enjoyment and maybe a lifelong interest for young Heidi. Ciera and Jenny are in college now and Heidi is in High School. I miss those volleyball years, but it was rewarding that today Gina showed me a picture on her smart phone of Heidi's fine art pieces. It made me very happy and glad I shared some time with Heidi when she was young!
News coverage in the last 48 hours is a constant reminder (if you watch) of violence as profound and tragic as an elementary school shooting. Oh how I pray we can have a better society in the future and have secure and safe schools for you!
The social ability to recognize the emotion someone is feeling that produces rage and violence is needed in the United States and around the world. The mass killings in the news are examples of most extreme negative emotions of mentally ill individuals. In a terrible form of recognition the sick individual gets attention. We as a functional humanity must detect and help those who are suffering from mental illness and so prone to violence.
Charles has dedicated his life to education and he has buried his wife and son, yet like Jobe of the Bible he still loves life, God and his fellow humans. As a committed educator he has applied cognitive empathy and ideas most positive in his service to others. In spite of grief and loss of loved ones he looks to what is lovely, true and just. The wisdom of Philippians 6-9 is the answer to discovering quite strength in an atmosphere of peace.
The hallmark of a society that suffers from a lack of peace is one that devalues human life and is one that is entertained by violence and looks at death in ways that do not respect human life, but cheapen it! We cannot look to ugly, dehumanizing things or be entertained by arts and performances that are dark and primarily about things the opposite of selfless love and still expect to also experience the “peace that surpasses all understanding". The reason for this is as obvious as seeing that oil and water do not mix. a skilled artist knows how to create a beautiful lithograph because of the physical difference of oil and water. In a greater way God can create a person with a beautiful soul, by blending an individual's awareness of past sin with a desire to serve Him and create living art.
Without God in the mix, the soul languishes as unblended unrefined substance that is a murky color at best. But when the murky soul is touch by His spirit beautiful refraction shines like a rainbow. Without this stimulation spiritual substance only reflects the culture it is contained in and resonates in course, crude opposition to the ideals of human dignity.
In cultures of predominately material gain, greed and selfishness can bring about the worst in human behavior, individuals can be made to feel they are worth noting, proper sexual identity for adolescents and the young becomes a struggle, as selfish pleasures spawn things as horrible as human trafficking. Greed and selfishness makes persons who are in darkness, situationally incapable of empathy. Some do not try to imagine being in other person's shoes or being without shoes entirely. But the peace that surpasses all understanding, through selfless love can intuit the emotion of the other person and transform grief and sadness into forms of healing. This form of emotion can internalize and make one feel what they are feeling, in a way taught by the life of Jesus Christ or by a Saint such as Mother Theresa.
The psychopaths who kill and those who hate, and those consumed with material gain for self lack this emotional empathy. The deficits of the persons without empathy, who is primarily narcissistic, can become a plague upon humanity, until the sick society returns to the healing ways advocated in Phillippians 6-9 there will great suffering. God bless teachers like Charles who have continued to shine bright and who teach us to shine bright. May you dear Samuel and your generation know a peace that surpasses all understanding!