Wind in Your Sail

The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves, no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

It is much easier to speak about or write about surrender than it is to live it. Success has often the greatest roadblock to surrender. Is only in a surrendered life that one finds the wind to fill a sail that guides and pushes you on to promised “victory”. The full sail has defiant optimism… The best book is still to be written, the best brushstrokes are ready for a canvas, the best invention still on the drawing board.
For youth, your greatest wealth are your options, the many highways awaiting your travel. Don’t be like a rudderless, compass-free ship in a great ocean, learn early in life to structure good habits, solid routines.
The first time this world traveller was in Venice, Italy many years ago, I remember just the back of the Doge’s palace, just off of St. Mark's square, I walked across the bridge of “sighs” which Shakespeare spoke about in his play, “Merchant of Venice” as to the prisoners going to their deaths. I looked through the window on the bridge at that beautiful city. The prisoners sighed because they knew their options were over.
Over the years, university-military service-employer of many people and just an observer of humankind: I have often wondered, with just one life to live, and it goes by so fast, how can anyone be so totally casual, and lackadaisical about their one life… Such a short time to accomplish things, but, I decided that God sees in sinners, potentials that I cannot see. He knows how to truly rehabilitate. Does it not amaze you the people who have come back from the edge of destruction to make something of their lives? We are not saved by imitating Christ, we are saved because of the sacrifice of his death. The thief on the cross did not know one thing about Jewish law, had probably never done anything good for anyone, but Jesus saw in him the reason for His sacrifice next to our Lord, the reason for his sacrifice, his power to redeem.
When this writer was young, the typewriter was great technology. I well understand the bottomless ocean of technology and our young people’s thrill with technology. Most do not understand that their jobs will be taken over by robots; they forget that this is the real world where there is a need for real men, real women, facing the real struggles of life, needing the real joy of truth and accomplishment; needing the real structure of truth and tradition: god-fearing honor of work, majesty of marriage, the joy of accomplishment in the rearing of children. I still remember the time when the husband went off to work, carrying his lunchbox, happy to support his wife and family. Fathers were honored by mothers and justly honored by their children. My mother cooked food the way my father liked it. She paid little attention to the whims and wants of children (“When your children get hungry, you will eat.”) My parent’s children were not allowed to complain about anything on the table because meager as it was, it had the blessings of God.  We have all had our bellies full of mothers who sweet talk their dogs while screaming and cursing at their own children. How many husbands have I heard say,”I wish my wife loved me as much as she loves our dog.”
One thing you can write in stone, in this day of political correctness, this day of the unpopularity of Christianity, the good are getting better, the bad are getting worse. Millennials, age 18 to 35, everything based on emotion, everything based on feeling, not fact, fairness, not honesty. Perhaps this is the reason only 4% of millennials have anything to do with the church. AND, it is not always the fault of the hardworking, taxpaying, concerned parents who raise them, and who led them to Sunday school and church, taught them the difference between right and wrong. Perhaps this is the reason these hardworking parents save the money to send them to a good college, even a tax-supported school, sat back and saw liberal-communist-atheist professors destroying everything good they had instilled in their much-loved children. The wind in the sail that will determine your destiny as well as your destination, determined by attitude, your attitude towards the holiness of God… His holy spirit pushing-directing you. Self, whether slothfulness or swaggering, can never be anything but hateful to God, people who are poor are in a position to receive. How can I receive gold in my hands when my hands are already full with self-indulgence stuff?
Outside the city of Cairo, Egypt (a city of 20 million where the population is so thick, each person has about enough room to stand, where buses travel the streets with people hanging on them), on the Giza plateau, the exact center of the world’s earth’s surface, the Great Pyramid… Covering an area of 13 acres, 240,000 tons of stone, cut in exact blocks joined together, the place of joining so exact, that human hair would not go in to the place where the blocks are joined together. The government allowed this world traveller to enter this great structure, the oldest structure standing in the world, the interior large enough to place both St. Paul’s and Notre Dame cathedrals,  I wondered how such a structure could be built before the time that even the Greeks had discovered the symbol for mathematical pi (3.17---), before there was even any way to transport blocks of stone that weighed 60 tons each, we want to give so much credit to the wisdom of man, ancient or now, can we even imagine the wind in the sail of those who built the pyramids, those who built the great wall of China (2,000 miles long over Himalayan mountains, wide enough for four horses to walk side-by-side, guardposts every forty feet built to keep out the Mongol hoards, yet the wall was immediately breached because the guards were bribed), the great dams-bridges-highways-railroad beds on which train tracks are laid, scientific knowledge gained about cells (DNA), each of the trillions of cells in a living body containing information that will fill 10 pages, a complete encapsulation of your total ancestry, and to think, that there are those who would still kill or abort the unborn child possessing this knowledge and potential: “God of our fathers, known of old… be with us yet, Lest we forget, lest we forget” (Kipling).