Hoping in Wonderland

In a week or so I will go back to Greece, isn’t that wonderful? I really mean wonderful. I wonder about how many zillions of different places and conditions there are on this little planet and how they are always changing with time. How does God keep up with it all? But He does!

I am going this time with a very specific purpose, to take my sons there and leave them. For a while they will explore the land and the peoples of their heritage. They will listen to the strange language that they have only learned in snippets from me and other Greek Americans and they will be forced to learn how to speak Greek to communicate their needs, just like my grandparents had to learn English to communicate with the Americans when they first arrived a little over a hundred years ago.  I hope they will see how differently the Greeks think which is reflected in the way they express themselves. I earnestly hope they learn Greek that much.

I hope that the living spirits of my grandparents will be with them on this journey as they were with me when I first went there as a teenager. I wish I could go there for the first time again. Instead, I will hold their hands and introduce them to this and that, and to him and her, and then I will disappear.

I will be invisible to them, but I will probably not be silent. Most of my grandparents left their own parents once and for all when they left their country. Telephones hadn’t even been invented. They were explorers and settlers in this very strange new land.

I love how reality can change in an instant with travel and with time and how that reminds me that someday and forever our reality will be on the new earth with days of darkness, hatred, fear, illness, and poverty way behind us in time and space. God makes it so easy for us to imagine that world; it’s a pity more people don’t make an effort to prepare to go there. Oh well, different travelers have different agendas I suppose.

May your week be holy and peaceful. May Love fill you and shine the Way before you. May you see millions of stars at night, the clear sun all day, and may your immortality be assured. Yassou Too.