Walking to school, uphill both ways.

I remember Wednesdays on the farm. It was washing day and by night my mom’s hands were raw, red, and bleeding. She used an iron tub and a washing board. It had “ribs” on it and she would rub the heavy cottons up and down, dipping them again and again. After rinsing, she would take it outside to hang on the clothesline to dry in the wind and sun. The cloth was stiff but smelled heavenly. Chicken for supper meant catching the screaming chicken, cleaning and feathering it, cutting and roasting, or cooking. We lived in a tropical climate, so we didn’t have an oven.

The vegetables came from the garden, (where else?) and fruits from the trees, while berries grew on bushes. Most people grew potatoes, onions, and most importantly, nature’s antibiotic, garlic. There was no room in the pantry for pet food, but we had no pantry. No refrigerator either.

Although women’s work was strenuous by today’s standards, men’s work was much harder. Backbreaking is an appropriate description of it. Men didn’t complain and always faced the reality that they may have to stop and take arms to defend their way of life. I didn’t know any men who didn’t have a second job in the army.

Now, most of what we called women’s work and much of the back-breaking work is done by machines powered by electricity and fuels. Work is something we do in an air-conditioned office using a computer mouse. Even “blue collar” jobs are a fraction of what they used to be in terms of physical contribution. People are no longer imagining a life that is less back-breaking, but a cruise or resort vacation every few months.

I was attempting to tell my children what we used to do and my child said. Yes, dad, you used to walk to school for a mile carrying 30 lbs of books going uphill both ways, and they laughed. The sacrifice that their elders made is not registering in their spoiled young brains. They think we are kidding.

Surprisingly, they can and do go on one of their holidays and see people living in the same conditions that we used to live in. Half, if not more, of the world’s population, still live in poverty and face food insecurity. We talk about advancing them to our level but can’t do it. If we did, the pollution we would create would kill all living things on earth.

Strangely, the Heaven that most of us strive to get to is not available doesn’t matter what we do. I learned that in Heaven, all things are good. God, the creator of the universe, will handle all the problems. Mom will not have red bleeding hands, and dad will not hammer red hot iron sprinkling a shower of sparks on himself. There will be no cancer or other diseases and no annoying lineups for passports, or a shortage of houses for hard-working people. Hunger and thirst will not exist, nor will hard work make existence hard or impossible. All we have to do to get there is live life without sin and eternal bliss will follow.

Now I am old in human terms and my brain or mind is full of life’s experiences. I still believe in Heaven and have seen people experiencing what we can only describe as Hell. It is physical, but the worst of it is not material. There is pain that hurts worse than anything physical and it doesn’t get better. The pain of guilt. The only cure for it is forgiveness, but it’s nearly impossible to truly forgive, not just say we do.

The universe is charged with something. Here we call it electricity. It must have negative and positive and all its benefits are in between the two. We have captured it, direct it and use it, but it’s always there. We can’t see it, hear or feel it without help. There is no reason to think that it’s not so in heaven.

The old ones who wrote the Bible described it as light and dark, order and disorder. They didn’t use computers, but they easily could have been wiser than us. They described a garden of Eden but humans were not happy enough with it and got themselves kicked out to where there is hard work and great pain. From that point, life was and is challenging and risky. 

Those who pay attention know that God, the supreme universal intelligence, or whatever we choose to call him, is willing to grant us what we want or pray for. He knows our hearts. We are sending Him a message that we wouldn’t admit to ourselves. We want the Heaven described in the literature but only for ourselves.

Now we are arriving at an age of artificial intelligence, robots, nanomedicine, and much more than we could imagine even a little time ago. If we don’t destroy the atmosphere that sustains us on Earth, much of Heaven will be possible soon. What we create will give us most of what we always wished for, but the others who are not as privileged will block us. We only move forward if we move together. We must only take what we need and leave the rest. We have to control those who eat it all.

Here is a link to my blog: https://thesimpleravenspost.blogspot.ca/  Feel free to check other articles and comment.