Do What You Can

My dear friends...

Let’s talk about the world this week.

Time Magazine a while back, published a cover story on Global Warming headlined: Be worried. Be VERY worried. In that story, this bastion of news magazine conservatism announced that the problem was 33% worse than anyone has so far estimated.

Former Vice President Al Gore warns that the global warming problem is the biggest crisis facing humanity today. What we are going to do about it is no longer a political problem, he says, it is a moral problem.

I have been saying for years that the problem facing humanity today is not a political problem, it is not an economic problem, and it is decidedly not a military problem: it is a spiritual problem. It has to do with what we believe as the group called humanity.

Our most basic beliefs about God, about Life, and about Each Other, are at issue here. Those beliefs are creating our day-to-day experience—and that experience is turning devastating.

Tidal waves and hurricanes and tornadoes and earthquakes and melting icecaps are wracking the earth. Add to this our man-made problems of terrorism and border wars and nuclear threats and invasions and raging poverty and ethnic cleansing and whatever else human beings can dream up to make each other miserable and you have a real picture of a Planet in Turmoil---with no end in sight.

We can bring an end to this long global nightmare if we will but change our ways. Mostly we have to change not what we’re doing, but what we’re ignoring.

First, we’re ignoring ourselves. We treat ourselves worse than we treat our cars—and that’s pretty bad.

We don’t go to the doctor for check ups. We don’t eat right. We don’t exercise. Plain and simply, we don’t take care of ourselves.

I’m speaking about most of us now. Clearly, not you. I know that you do all of these things. It’s just most of the rest of us who don’t…

Second, we’re ignoring each other—and each other’s plight. Over 400 children an hour are dying of starvation on this planet. Some 200,000 people were killed in ethnic cleansing, with over a million and a half forced from their homes and now roaming as refugees in parts of Africa

Third, we’re ignoring the worldwide political instability that we all see. Actually, many of us are doing worse than ignoring it. We are actually supporting it. And I won’t even mention the worldwide environmental crisis that looms over all of humankind. (Talking about the ecology is just for sissies, right?)

What can the average person do about any of this? That’s the question that stops us—because, of course, we think that the answer is: nothing.

Yet that is not true.

It is true that we may not be able to do very much to affect things in the short run, but there’s a great deal we can do to affect things in the long run. And that’s where all truly significant change is made anyway.

What we can do in the long run is to work to help humanity expand its belief system, alter its understanding, and enlarge its awareness about who we are, what life is really about, who and what God is, and what God wants from us.

This is not easy work, but it can be done. Because it is not easy, it will require the attention of dedicated, committed people. Many of them. I have often said that if there were a thousand people around the globe willing to do what they could do to make the world a different place, this task could be accomplished within ten years.

But it would take commitment. Real commitment. Commitment of time, talents, and financial resources. I hope that most of you have already made such a commitment and that you have activated it by supporting the efforts of those who work on behalf of all of us to make this a better world. (I also hope that you will consider that the Foundation that sends out this Bulletin every week is one of them.) And whatever you do, remember this: the present moment is as much a time of opportunity as it is a time of danger. How we create tomorrow depends on what we do today. So…as Helen Keller famously urged: Do what you can do.

Blessed be,

Unless there is.

Read this week's Letter to Neale here

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Read a message from one of the prisoners impacted by our Prison Outreach HERE