Zum Geburtstag viel Glück! - Happy Birthday - Feliz Aniversario

Spiritual resource to share: we are all in this together

Two of our "sons" Kyu-Po from Korea and David from Germany

It was the best scene. My older son and I were a part of an international youth conference full of about 1,000 kids from 40+ countries involved in Rotary's international youth exchange. Someone (!?!) told the conference organizer that her son's birthday was that day, and so my son was called up during one of the major sessions to his great embarrassment and joy (you know how that goes). There was lots of whooping and hollering and clapping and laughing as these thousand kids sang "Happy Birthday." Where I was sitting, I could hear a group of lively Brazilian students and some strong voiced German kids singing "Happy Birthday" at the top of their lungs in their native tongue.

I love this stuff. So does my family. In the last ten years, we have been deeply involved either in working internationally or hosting people from other countries in our home.

The big neon sign lesson in all of this has been the experience of the universal nature of God and man. We all celebrate life and birth and connections and wisdom. We are all connected. We are all one.

Dr. Dennis White, one of the many speakers at this conference, gave parents and kids an opportunity to think through what it means to be bi-cultural -- as the ability to move gracefully from one cultural orientation to another as the situation calls for it. Culture is explained as everything outside of the natural world and it defines how we think feel and behave.

I realize that harmonious relations - either with our fellow church member, our neighbor, or an exchange student or even international dignitaries - all have a basis that goes even deeper than the behavioral, emotional, or identification with a group. Harmonious relations are based on the idea of oneness. And, in my practice of Christian Science, this oneness is based on one God, one Truth, one Mind - all synonyms of God. Mary Baker Eddy helps to define and clarify this:

This scientific sense of being, forsaking matter for Spirit, by no means suggests man's absorption into Deity and the loss of his identity, but confers upon man enlarged individuality, a wider sphere of thought and action, a more expansive love, a higher and more permanent peace.

It is delightful to learn about other's cultures, but even more so to see how affirming it is that we each are a part of that oneness that comes from an infinite God. So the basis of our identity is to reflect an infinite range of possibility stemming from an infinite God. Who I am becomes clearer as I love who you are and all of us are children of one God.

We are never diminished by including a wider sphere of individuals and experiences into our lives, but can only be blessed.





To share your thoughts on this or to explore this idea further, please feel free to be in contact with me, add your own comments below, email this article to a friend, or add to the healing finds and sites on the web to the right.