...with abundant love.

While jogging my 15th mile on June 24, 1999, it became crystal clear to me what I was supposed to do in this life. That is, keep asking myself, what does my heart tell me? Especially in matters of the spiritual.

And in my daily journal on that day, I wrote that I was saddened because I saw a dead snapping turtle on the road. And I thought that the turtle was killed intentionally, by the likes of a woman I saw a few days earlier, who saw me helping a turtle to safely cross the road, and then yelled out the car window, ‘kill ‘em.’

Maybe she came back and did the job.

The turtle’s shell wasn’t totally crushed. It was as if someone had taken a sledgehammer and pounded down on the shell, cracking it three ways. And the turtle in the throes of dying, moved several feet, evidenced by a trail of blood. I wondered if the deed was done by someone who got some sadistic pleasure from watching those last gasps of life.

My heart told me to mourn that turtle. And to ask god if there’s a Paradise where senseless killing never occurs? Where all life forms live in harmony.

I reflected that I should mourn for everyone massacred during the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and in Rwanda and Nazi Germany and so many other places on Earth. Even in these so-called modern and enlightened times.

But almost 9 years ago, I was mourning for a turtle. Because I happened to cross the path where the turtle tried to cross a road. And I thought that maybe my kind of god wants me to mourn the needless and senseless death of any and every thing. Yes, a god that wants me to revere the life force.

I guess my kind of god would encourage me to dream about what it must be like in Paradise. And to treat life as if we are already there…with abundant love. –Jim Broede