Happy Easter to all Western Christians. This year, Eastern Orthodox Pascha/Easter will be celebrated much later, on May 5. This post is not about religion, but faith.
I wanted to share this video with you, and I must say, it is hard to watch. On March 26, at the public forum in Oklahoma Senate building I sat across a grieving couple, Allen and Taylor Martin, while they talked about the murder of their daughter Trista Martin by a Pfizer-made injection of poison. Her full story is here. I recorded this 1 minute video on my cellphone while they spoke. (I will post the full recording of the OK hearing in the next post). The parents recounted the demise of their beloved daughter - a good, caring, virtuous soul whose dreams included being a mother herself. She had just turned 18, and got Pfizer injections against her parents’ wish. There was not a dry eye in the room, and I fought my own tears back. I should be used to hearing these stories by now, but I am not and will never be. It was really, really hard, and I cannot even begin to imagine what it feels like to be in the place of parents who lost their child to a cold-blooded, calculated murder.
The room originally reserved for this meeting was too small to accommodate the 60+ people who wanted to be there (including 11 state legislators), and thankfully a larger room was found for the second part of this event. That room happened to have a beautiful mural dedicated to the victims of war:
The evil that we face is made so much uglier by the majority indifferent, willfully blind society who prefer the comfort of lies, denying that awful crimes have been committed and preventing the true justice. The situation is made harder still as we cannot make fellow humans see the truth until they chose to.
My friend Katherine Watt talked about finding the strength to face the evil in re-establishing her connection with Christian faith in a recent interview, and I hope that these words will be an inspiration for many to rise in defense of fellow human beings:
The nature of God-given free will is to choose for good or evil. This awesome power, if misused, can cause tremendous pain and destruction, but used for good it is truly capable of moving mountains.
“Much on Earth is hidden from us, but in return we have been given a secret sense of our living connection with the other, higher world, and the roots of our thoughts and feelings are not here, but in that other world. That is why philosophers say that the essence of things cannot be comprehended on Earth. God took seeds from other worlds and sowed on this Earth and nurtured his garden, and everything that could rise has risen, but what is alive is nurtured by a sense of connection between this world and the mysterious other world. If this feeling weakens or is destroyed in you, then the nurtured in you also dies. Then you will become indifferent to life and even hate it.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
Today I pray that more and more people will turn away from evil and choose good.