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The world forgets youthful rootedness. We often keep alive those ventures of our youth that were negative. Why do we, when we evolve into adults, dwell on the things of youth, on the things of the past? I love the contrast that God’s Grace has presented: “A Phoenix, A Peace, and A Storm!”

In his poem, Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami wrote: “Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm follows you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn’t something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn’t get in, and walk through it, step by step.”

Then, we will regenerate ourselves, like the phoenix, into matured adults, and bring about the peace that sooths or kills the storms that rage within us.  Murakami continues, “one thing is certain, when you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”

I see today’s youth with evolutionary storms full of self-unawareness, loneliness, doubt, lack of certainty, violence, and self-deprecation; their storms are significant to society’s existence. From Vincent van Gogh’s letters: “There is peace even in the storm.” Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote while in a Birmingham jail: “peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice.” Peace is an issue that addresses fairness for all concerned. As we evolve into adulthood, we become aware of the fact that something must be done to bring about self-awareness, self-peace, spiritual peace.

There is something fabulous about the Greek mythical bird of red and golden feathers. Although the origin story of the phoenix is in mythology from Arabia and Egypt, the story is still true. The phoenix had the ability to rise from the dead through regeneration of itself. There is a point of spiritual history here to be shared and told. This mythological creature’s existence and example are part of our reality as youth evolving into adults.

Youth – and we adults who work with them – will rise like a phoenix, with a peace that will soothe or kill a storm!

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