That Your Days May Be Long - nurturing a 5th commandment mindset

A few months ago, I shared with the great Kim Vargas how fabulous energies were pinging off each other in my head.  As creative & exhilarating as they felt, I needed to winnow them down, to figure out which grabbed my interests (basically all of them), which grabbed my attention (a small smattering), and which grabbed my heart (the precious few).  

 

Gee, consciously give your mind a task & unimaginably awesome things can result!  Sure did for me.

Hands down, the strongest, loudest PINGING energy is around writing a book.  That Your Days May Be Long - our sacred call to nurture a 5th commandment mindset.   A book bridging all ages, from cradle to our last moment.  

And one inspired by a down-in-the-dumps grannie client!

This was about four years ago.  Anne was feeling low.  She kept bemoaning being a drain on her children, that she didn't have a car, had to depend on others & it was so unfair to them.  "I am a thorn in their sides, a drag on their lives."

After taking numerous approaches to bucking her up - all of which failed - it hit me.  She kept saying that while she needed her children, her children no longer needed her.  

That idea kept rumbling around my mind - was it true that they no longer needed her?  In what context could I argue that they did need her, that she could be of use to them in a way that literally no one else could.  In my heart, I knew there was an unarguable argument to be made, but it eluded me.  Because it was so obvious.

As our parents grow older, needing more help, more active support, they give us the opportunity to step up & be there for them.  They open ways we can discover how to care about & be helpful without harming ourselves & others.  We have countless situations primed for personal growth & learning detachment from things we hold so incredibly dear.  

In short, they give us their great final gift - the opportunity to honor & respect them, as we are commanded by the Divine to do!  Only our parents can open the way to fulfilling the 5th commandment - Honor your father & your mother, that your days may be long (prosperous) upon the land with the Lord your God gives you.  

The next time Anne slipped into a trough of sadness & despair over having NOTHING she could do for her children, I got her full attention telling her that God had different plans, that she could make a difference every day for all her days by doing the very thing she thought was so horrendous - giving her children the opportunity to honor their mother.  She doesn't harp so much on being a bother to her children - she knows that I'll just bring up God & she finds it impossible to argue effectively against Divinely given plans!

The book will be my take, from a lifetime of experience & observation, on seeing the funky fabulous call of closing years & the remarkable promise of prosperity to those who help make it so. 

We need - all of us, children & parents - to develop a better 5th commandment mindset.  It's not easy.  Can guarantee you right now that it won't include any how-to tips or outlines for the best way to respond to our parents when they need us most.  But I can help get people awake aware & ready to be active.  It's one of the things I'm best at, when people let me.  Because they often don't.  

A lot of people want easy answers, cut & dry check lists, simple to implement processes.  And that's not what wins the blessing of prosperity.  It takes developing qualities rather than accumulating knowledge, learning processes rather than protocols & procedures.  It means letting go of previous concepts & assumptions, of old hurts & often bitter assumptions.  It means figuring out just what IS meant by honoring & is it possible with a parent who might have abused you in the worst ways imaginable.  It means realizing that sometimes honoring requires setting & respecting healthy boundaries.  

This is the book I've trained all my life to write.  It's not something I want to do - it's something I'm being flat-out called to write.  To look at the fact that parents have a deep, divinely-implanted love of their children, from new born to middle aged & beyond.  Children don't have a similar strong drive to protect their parents.  What God instilled in parents was handed down to children as a COMMANDMENT.  What do theologians & others think about the difference from a natural drive to a supernatural edict from on High?  

 

Instead of pinging energies darting all around my brain, one great longing fills my heart - write what I've learned over the past 63 years that harks back to nurturing a 5th commandment mindset.  Because it's pretty clear that's just where I've been heading all along.  

Time to get writing from the heart, to start writing down the bones.  Time for discipline, learning new skills, brushing up old ones, getting it done.