The Second Coming

    In march, like many people,  I idly wondered if we were going to experience a bubonic plague of epic proportion. Where two thirds of the population die and it will be the end of western civilization as we know it!

 Turns out, that what I didn't know was that, in a way, our worrying and overreaction WOULD be an end. Plus a start of something different  in a way that was unforeseeable.

    I watched an old TV series by Kenneth Clark called Civilization. In it he talked about what makes a civilization. He also touched a little on how they start and end. At the end of the series he quoted a poem by Yeats called "The Second Coming." It captured a little of what I think and feel about all that has happened recently.       

                                       

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.


    It is doom and gloom but professes a truth that was easy to see expressed in the "cancel everything  idea" and riots and looting.

    Not long after hearing this poem Clara and I came to the epilogue of president Hinckley's "Standing for Something" . It was a message of hope and conviction. In it he quoted Paul. "We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair;  persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed;"

    That is where President Hinckley stopped but Paul goes on to say,

    "For all things are for your sakes, that the abundant grace might through the thanksgiving of many redound to the glory of God. For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worked for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory;"

    President Hinckley and Paul are so uplifting to my spirit. I love the wes, ours, and uses. The message that everything is for my good and our good, that gratitude contributes greatly to any situation.

That the Lord has conquered all, has given, and continues to give me, significant and uplifting hope. 

    

    My dahlias are not quite tucked away for winter. I will get it done. I have ordered some more for next year and I am already looking forward to it.