Christian Living

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Larry Lilly's Letter Tuesday October 30,2007

The statement, "Nothing is more important than family" is usually attached to a long tirade of some sort with a plea at the end assuring you that your continued support is needed if the family is survive as we perceive it. Not so with this one. The statement is found near the end of Juli Swisher's magnificent story, Broken Dreams Along The Hudson, in New Century Publishings' book, Inspiration From The Heartland.

Juli's story is listed as fiction as she is a member of the Indiana Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators among numerous other groups. Don't let the credentials throw you, this story is on target for the entire family and Juli uses a grand selection of words to paint the story so graphically that you can smell the Hudson, and see an old withered woman dressed in rags who lives under a bridge apparently, saving the heroine child from sure death and mysteriously gives the above quote designed to bring man who is on the verge of losing it all, not only the money and prestige, but his most precious thing on earth, his family, to his senses.

Mrs. Swisher leads you along as the father in the story comes to the end of himself, faces reality and admits that he has been foolish in attempting to live in the treacherous waters of the river denial. His realization of the value of the people he had been on the verge of abandoning comes rushing at him like a runaway freight train and unlike so many, he embraces this epiphany and accepts the hope that comes with self realization and the strength of the true love of wife and children and a St. Bernard. Hey, if a St. Bernard loves you, you can make it!!

I love to read and over the years I have read many stories directed at different age groups and in recent years for some reason I receive skillions of pieces of mail, catalogs and magazines directed at Senior Citizens. I truly resent the stereotyping of me by ARRP and other organizations that think just because you've been around a long time, are bald and have arthritis that you are somehow old. In my heart I sincerely believe I could whip most of the whippersnappers that write such pulp trash. Yet in spite of trifocals, the listed realities, plus being married to an eternally young woman for 43 years, I was blessed and encouraged by Broken Dreams Along The Hudson.

In my work with prisoners and many men and women who are on the way down from a modicum of success I hear expressed in one way or another the lament, "I wish I had realized just how much Mary or John or what I had really meant to me. You know, Larry, you just don't appreciate what you have until it's gone." In prison cells all over America you will hear this or at least see it in the lonesome eyes of hundreds of thousands of those who grasp the meaning of having loved ones just a little too late.

The Bible is replete with verses and principles on the subject of being truthful with our self. A passage in Hamlet, based on the importance of total honesty with our self about our self is classic. In his farewell to his son, Laertes, Polonius states: "This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man." Rupert, the father in Juli's story nearly loses it all for failing to heed this timeless advice.

Larry Lilly Copyright © 2007 Use with credit.
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