Well, Believer, thank you for your kind thoughts and prayers. I deeply appreciate them.
My personal religious choice is Buddhist, but if I were to translate the concepts I’ve been taught back into Christian terms it would go something like this: If God is infinite and omnipresent, then God’s love must penetrate every atom of the universe. And since the Past is gone, the Future does not yet exist, and the Present is ungraspable, we are actually already in Eternity even though we appear to be in Time.
My faith in these things is very great and the joy of them shines through any temporary discomfort like sunlight through a translucent curtain. I hope and pray your faith does, too.
It is certainly the case that my support by the Federal government is a little more up close and personal than most, but people do not realize or truly understand the dense cocoon of safety the Federal government places around us all.
Consider the Federal Aviation Administration: a couple of weeks back some of their radar computers went down and the traffic controllers had to halt most takeoffs, put everybody up in the air on a holding pattern, and bring those planes down a little at a time. There were hundreds of them up there, slowly losing fuel, circling around or backing down their airspeed to slow their arrival. A map of the United States on the television news that displayed this looked like the inside of a beehive at swarm. Thousands of people were at risk, but all of them got down without a single casualty.
That was The Government at work, and doing it’s work so well that the incident is all but forgotten. Whether we realize it or not, every aspect of our lives–from the multi-lane expressways we drive on, the prescription drugs we take, and the National Forests we camp in–is penetrated through and through by The Government, working quietly and well, doing things for us as well as to us, paying off on those splendid promises in the Preamble of our Constitution, and virtually unnoticed by all its citizens.
Long, long ago I was part of it, and I was proud to be so. I still am.
