Missionaries, Not Troops

Editor:

Hopefully if Mitt Romney is elected president, he'll send our boys out into our communities and the world to ask elders, women and children, "Is there anything we can do right now to help you, anything at all?" ("The Mormon Moment," Sept. 6.) They could plant neighborhood gardens, offer to babysit or chop wood and carry water.

Sound too boring? Not ego satisfying? Well, there's always the standard "Christian soldier, white knight, we're right, conquerors of evil" alternative that justifies war and the infiltration of corporate do-gooding by brainwashing and manipulating innocent sinners into believing they aren't good enough for one reason or another, so buy this product.

Christians are so hung-up with the rules that they forget that Jesus sat around all day with the worst of humanity and just relaxed, laughed and ate figs and nuts. Nobody was judged, ridiculed or made to feel there was something wrong with them. In this acceptance of life as it is, light, joy and peace could manifest, which naturally dispelled anger, resistance, judgment and the sense of separation from our fellow humans.

Life itself (God) is so easy and wonderful and abundant. How the human ego converts childlike simplicity into complex chaos should give us pause. To pause means to stop what we're doing.

Jesus didn't "do" much because he was in peace just "being." He cultivated the presence of God within himself by sitting, breathing, enjoying nature, eating simply, walking up a hill or down into a valley.

Man creates his own hell, not by drinking beer or having a child out of wedlock or smoking pot, but by the judgment of life itself, manifest in all its myriad possibilities, as being wrong or sinful, damn darn it!

Becky Peterson, McKinleyville