“The Lord is your keeper; The Lord is your shade at your right hand. The sun shall not strike you by day, Nor the moon by night. The Lord
shall preserve you from all evil; He shall preserve your soul.” (Psalm 121:5-7; New King James Bible (NKJV). “And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong
wind tore into the mountains and broke the rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the
wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after
the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the
fire a still small voice.” (1st
Kings 19:11-12; NKJV). “He
has shown you, O man, what is
good; And what does the Lord require of
you But to do justly, To love
mercy, And to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah
6:8; NKJV). Times really do change as the years
tick away. Nothing stays exactly the same. Yet, the combating forces of good and evil
still make their appearance in our everyday lives. Sometimes one, single event can produce an upheaval
in the world, causing changes throughout the globe. Other times, change creeps upon us so slowly that
we don’t recognize it for several years.
Earth’s
climate change has been in the slower category. Unstable and more dramatic weather-patterns
have been creeping up over the globe for many years, now. Almost everyone is part of the search for the
cause of this dilemma. This has even given rise to a division of those who
favor the hypothesis of global warming
versus those who favor the hypothesis of global
cooling. Because the weather
patterns are so unstable, however, it is hard to get a true fix on either side
of the debate. (For example, here in
central Illinois, our maps had been changed some years ago to show us as having
a much dryer, browner, terrain than in years past. The ‘dry’ maps lasted about five or more
years, and then the rains came back. Now
our current maps are greener again.) Nevertheless, these two
views of the earth’s dramatic climate behavior brings forth dire theories and
warnings of mankind’s destructive nature, putting blame on people for all our
weather woes. This year’s bountiful
snow fall and record cold temperatures, all over the US, have people really
scratching their heads after all the threats of global warning. Whichever side one takes on the warming-trend
vs. the cooling-trend debate, however, neither side, nor theory, has been
definitive. Some of us have lived
through many changes in Earth’s weather patterns. When I tell my children, or grandchildren, of
past memories of growing up in Southern Wisconsin, my stories of the snowfall
up to the second floor windows make them giggle in disbelief. My tales of trucks driving out on the Mississippi
River ice for ice-fishing just made them fear I’m delusional. They have never witnessed the winters of my
childhood, even when they visited up north.
But here’s a bulletin…the Mississippi did freeze up north, this
year. My cousin in Wisconsin called me
and told me all about it. Ice fishing
was back on the Mississippi, at least in some localities. So, like
mostly everyone else, I have my own theory of what may be occurring with our
climate; but oddly enough, I don’t go with either side of the global warming/cooling
debate. Instead, I think that there’s a possibility that neither global warming,
nor global cooling, is the result of any one thing that we, the people, are
doing to the physical environment. Climate
changes and extreme, destructive weather, can result from both physical and
mental influences around the world. So,
here are my thoughts on the issue: From
the physical perspective,
perhaps the weather extremes we’ve been experiencing over the last twenty or
thirty years have much to do with the nature of planets, themselves, rather
than blaming all the people of our world.
Planets, slowly, cool off from the core, radiating heat upward. Could it be that when this internal, radiating heat is released from the core, we, on
the surface of the planet, experience warmer temperature trends for a few years
before the core ceases to release such heat and re-stabilizes itself? That would explain the shifts of warming
trends (when the Earth’s ice areas melt) followed by cooling trends (when we
have whole countries with excess snowfalls and ice). From this analysis, it
may actually be a paradox we’ve been experiencing through the last few
decades. Maybe we experience on-again,
off-again bouts of global warming
because the earth’s core has actually been cooling
ever-so-slowly; and in our rush to make things someone’s fault, we fail to
check all the other possibilities, such as a hidden source of our dramatic
climate changes. If that’s the case, and
this effect of the core’s behavior upon our surface’s weather is caused by the earth
itself, then our climate woes are not
from bad, human behavior. Now, that isn’t to say
that we shouldn’t be good stewards of our planet. For our own comfort, we need to keep cleaning
our waterways and airways for ourselves and future generations. It’s better to live in a clean house than a
barn. I’m merely saying that blaming
everything on our neighbors, or pointing fingers at those who may disagree with
the ‘resident wisdom’, may regret their own stand in the matter, when proven wrong,
years later. The so-called ‘experts’
who declared that the ozone hole was due to mankind’s toxic emissions, were
absolutely convinced that the ‘hole’ was appearing because all humanity was
guilty of living wrongly on the planet.
It was announced, at the time, that the ozone hole was proving that we were
destroying the earth’s atmosphere with humanity’s excesses. Then someone decided to
study it in more detail; and it was discovered that this opening in the ozone
tended to be repetitive (around the same time each year) and that, possibly, it
was opening to allow the toxins that keep rising in the atmosphere to ‘go out’
into space…kind of like the planet was burping to cleanse the air below. Then it closed again, each year. In short, it had a schedule. It was possibly getting rid of the bad stuff in
Earth’s atmosphere and had probably been doing so for as long as the earth
existed with mankind upon it. Also,
while some ice shelves were melting, others were forming elsewhere, showing
that sometimes the fix is on a greater scale than mankind realizes. Perhaps, the divine Mind had already solved the
larger pollution problem of this world, or planets, all along. From
the mental perspective: This brings us to the mental influences that can affect our collective world
climate. Controversies abound in our
world today. We argue over
everything. And because nothing occurs
in a vacumn, our mental world, or collective consciousness, highlights the real atmosphere we need to cleanse, all around
the globe. For what we believe in we act
upon. When we believe in
strife and disrespect for everyone who thinks differently than we do, this mental
atmosphere pollutes our world in so many negative ways. Helping our neighbors fades away if we don’t
like our neighbors. Coldness and silence
fills our streets. Charity ceases for
those in need. Suspicion keeps us from
making new friends. And these are only a
few behavior patterns that emerge when goodwill leaves our daily lives. Harmony and abundance can
only exist in an atmosphere of universal love and respect for each other. Caring about our neighbors, as well as our
would-be enemies, is the only thing that will really clean up our collective,
mental atmosphere on our small planet. Case in point: the
worst mental-climate change I’ve seen in the last fifteen years is the
polarization of political philosophies that drag everyone down and keep the
citizens of all countries on the edge of their seats. No one has a pleasant night’s sleep in today’s
world, unless they shut off the news channels.
Political candidates on
every side of the isle lie, cheat, wrongly accuse, and try to destroy their
political opponents, rather than respect these individuals for their own desire
to serve the public purposes and more harmonious ways of life. We all come by our beliefs honestly. We each vote for the things we believe
in. But, for any candidate to vilify an
opponent, in any race, makes them unfit for the office he or she seeks. This is the type of cleansing of the air we really need to address…this disrespect
for another’s opinion. For several years, no
one has felt a full breath of fresh, friendly air. We sleep with controversies awaiting us in
the morning. The TV news channels have
become the highway of negativity. To
destroy the character of someone has become the news event of the day, used to
entertain millions. We don’t need to
worry about the toxic air we breathe through our lungs; we need to worry about
the toxic air we allow to flow through our minds. These toxic things we take in are there to
come out later, against someone else, if we don’t dismiss them from our
thoughts immediately. We all need to awaken
and cleanse our mental air. The
negativity of the world today is choking out the breathing passages of people around
the globe. Every act of unkindness
pollutes our present world. Every word
we use against someone to harm him, or her, is a plague that we afflict upon
our own soul because it will come back on us.
This incident is
recorded in the Bible about Christ Jesus: “When He had called the multitude to Himself, He said to them, “Hear and
understand: Not what goes into
the mouth defiles a man; but what comes out of the mouth, this defiles a man.” (Matthew 15:10-11;
NKJV).
I’m
sure the spiritual truth of this statement is just as true today, as it was a
couple thousand years ago. It shows that
we make our own environments. What we
say, think, and do has everything to do with the harmony, or disharmony, of our
life experiences here, in this finite sense of materiality. So,
we can stop blaming the weather ‘out there’ in our collective environment, or
blaming everyone else for the ‘bad’ things that happen in this whole human
experience. We share this human drama,
and we each play our part. Universal
love is the key to the harmony that we need to bring back to our daily lives,
wherever we are. The divine, invisible
presence of God is always ready and willing to turn any destructive situation
aside, if only we let go of our contribution of these destructions, and cease
letting them live here, within us. This
planet belongs to God, and the divine Intelligence who created the spiritual
universe is well able to keep it safe and sound. As long as we allow that spiritual Presence
to take over any destructive situation we helped to create, we are cleansing
our atmosphere. And even when we create
the destruction, God, infinite Spirit, can easily overturn it, when we turn our
destructive behavior back into the universal love that humanity needs. Our
forever harmony in the invisible kingdom of God, Spirit, is upheld by the
Creator and Source of all things. When we
mentally turn, in trust, to this invisible presence and ask for help, our
divine Source of all good (God) unties any and all knots we have foolishly tied
on this material plane of existence.
Then the natural harmony of God’s true creation comes forward into the
physical realm, in whatever purifying way it needs to occur, correcting
whatever is wrong. For as long as we
sojourn here, in this material sense of existence, this is a nugget of truth to
remember. |
