Description
This Spiritual Genius rightly said that you cannot think well of yourself unless you do think well of others, and that you cannot really think well of others until you have first come to think well of yourself.
Perhaps we should emphasize this thought: “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” Think of yourself and others as being one in Life. Think of that deep self within you as being one with the deep self in everyone else, for there is unity in all life, a oneness running through everything that lives, what Lowell called “the thread of the all-sustaining beauty that runs through all and doth all unite.”
You and I wish to feel that life holds nothing against us that even though we have made many mistakes, they will no longer affect us when we stop making them. It is never too late – never too late to know of the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man; never too late to forgive ourselves and others; never too late for a new day to dawn.
But the human mind is a strange mixture of joy and morbidity. We all have had so much negative and unhappy experiences that it seems almost too good to be true to believe that it really is never too late; that right now, in a split second, the sun can dispel the clouds of despair and bring new joy and hope to the heart. Probably one of the greatest lessons we shall ever learn is right here – all the mistakes of yesterday can be cancelled out now, today, if we permit them to be.
The desert waited a long time to be cultivated with a hand of kindness that its waste places might blossom, irrigated by the water from the high mountain tops where the everlasting snows of heaven melt down into a liquid, life-giving flow. Yes, the desert waited. But the mountain tops were always there, sublime in their majesty. And the sun was always shining, ever giving of its warmth and color. And the natural law of gravity was always causing the water to flow down toward the desert. It was the desert that waited, not the water, not the snow-topped mountain.
On that first day when the water reached the dry and parched desert, new life began to spring within it, new hope. The thorn disappeared and the rose bush blossomed; the cactus was uprooted and the date palm took its place, and the long, hot sands gave way to the green verdure of irrigated lands.