|
|
|
|
HOPE
IS THE LAST FRONTIER
Contributed by G. K. Lim (May 2, 1999) If you are about to give up, remember.....Hope is the last frontier. This is not a quotation; it’s my realistic evaluation of the harsh realities of life. When everything else seems to fail, it’s easy to give up, to feel sorry for oneself. Does the world care about you and your problems? Yes, it does, to an extent. People will help you, for a while -- your friends, your relatives, kind people who help but never ask for anything in return. But that’s only for a while. Eventually you have to be responsible for your survival. That’s when Hope comes in. Hope is the last frontier. It has never failed any living person. Period. Even if you are reduced to begging along the five foot way at Chow Kit, with sores all over your body, with people walking disdainfully by you, you still have Hope. Hope has never failed any living human being. Until the moment he or she breathes the last breath, there is Hope. Of course, once life leaves the body, another dimension takes over, and it is no more the concern of the current mortal dimension. Consider the 55-year-old woman in Kosovo whose family has been driven out of their home by the very people who are supposed to protect them ... whose husband had, a few days earlier, been hung upside down by soldiers, his stomach cut open, his guts spilled out, and died a slow death in front of his family... whose 27-year-old son had had both his eyes gouged out by soldiers and returned to her a blind man... whose two daughters had been gang-raped by neigbhours who were from another ethnic group... and who was now nursing her two daughters and her blind son, with no food, no extra clothings, on the run from soldiers from her own country. Consider this woman. What else does she have left? What else? I don’t know what else. Only Hope. The other alternative is to kill her three children and then herself -- which means she has decided not to give Hope a chance. Not a bad choice either. Many people do that. We have no right to say they made a wrong choice. When we consider this woman, our economic woes (because of the recession) pale in comparison. No income, no job. no business. So what? Big deal. There’s a story of a boy
in a monastery who was sad, unhappy. One day a
Now, that’s a terribly negative thing to say to this boy (Obviously, his elders were not active distributors of any of those direct selling companies sprouting all over Asia.) Sure enough, one morning, the puppy left the boy just as mysteriously as it had entered his life. The boy was sad again. Then it dawned upon the boy -- if happiness is temporary, then sadness is also temporary. Bingo! Moral of the story -- if you are about to give up, stop feeling sorry for yourself, tell sadness to leave you as soon as possible, and give Hope a chance. Because Hope works hand in hand with the subconscious mind. The underlying philosophy of the subconscious mind is, “If you think you can, you’re right. If you think you can’t, you’re right too.”  ANSWERS Contributed by Steven Teo (April 20, 1999) Pass this on, you never know whose life maybe in need of this today! EDITOR'S NOTE: Similar quotations from other religious books welcomed.
|
CHECK OUT
|
|
Copyright © RAYMA 1998,
1999 Feedback: rayma@po.jaring.my
|
The Malaysian Economy: A Perspective on Competitiveness