PERSPECTIVE

What sets you off?

What trips you up?

What undoes you?

Why does what makes your day, week, month, year, and life miserable, not affect someone else?

Why doesn’t a bad thing affect everyone the same?

 Why do some people leap off of buildings, or get a divorce, while others going through the same stuff become stronger and better?

Why are some people bitter and others better?

If life offers us all the same bad porridge, why are some bears better bears, while others become bad bears?

Why is one hair in your soup too many, while one hair on your head is not enough?

Isn’t the development of our attitudes a matter of perspective?

For my leisure reading I’m reading Owen Matthews book “Stalin’s Children” which is the true account of three generations from one family who lived in Russia during the 20s all the way through 2005. Owen Matthew is the grandson whose grandfather, Boris Bibikov, a dedicated Red Army officer, was killed by Stalin’s “Purges,” which saw ten million other good Russians killed by the madness of Stalin’s paranoia, Boris’s  wife Martha, was also accused of being an opposition member against Stalin, and was put in prison for eleven years, leaving their two girls, Lyudmila, age 4, and her sister Lenina, age 12 to be ripped from her arms and taken to one of the thousands of Stalin’s orphanages. The two little girls would face years of extreme abuses, isolation from each other, never to see their father again, nor able to see their mother until many years after her freedom.

Lyudmila would contract a life threatening case of tuberculosis in one of her many orphanages, this sicknes would ravage her body for the rest of her life, causing a sever limp. Lenina would become little Lyudmila’s mother until she too was taken from her sister. Owen Matthews studied reams and reams of documents, interviewed survivors of the purges who knew his family, as well as interviewing the two girls (his mother and aunt), their husbands, and his grandmother Martha. His story is a detailed account of the horrors, deprivations, beatings, near starvation's, and conscript work these two children endured during Germany’s attacks on Russian and their lives under Stalin.

To read through Owen Matthew’s docudrama makes one feel sad and puny, putting yourself into these children’s shoes seems unfathomable while sitting in a Starbucks, drinking my Vinti Misto, listening to Coffeehouse Rock, with climate controlled temperature. Could I have been as strong as these too little girls, how would I cope if I were there parent? Reading this book is an exercise in shaking my head and my spirit.

The stunning thing about Lyudmila and Lenina is not that they survived, but that they survived so well. Owen Matthews tells of thier racked bodies, physical deformities and hardships unmanageable, but which did not alter these girls’ happy dispositions. Too little girls that faced a mountain of obstacles with a mountain of tears only to come out with such great happy outlooks, but how is this possible when they saw limps floating in the rivers they played in, dead bodies as flotsam passing them as they picked berries for the starving soliders, mass herding from orphanage to orphanage, years in a hospital with the worse medical help one could ever see, but none of it deterred them from happy adult lives. Even in their adult years after being reunited after Stalin’s death, they saw more terrible times, three days after Lenina was engaged to her handsome, Red Army husband, she learned that he had his leg amputated by saw after his car hit a road mine on the way back to his outpost. The would be married for almost forty years and when asked about her husbands amputated leg she couldn't recall which leg it was.

Lyudmila was Owen Matthews’s mother, Lenina his aunt; he offers this explanation as to how in the face of unimaginable hardships these two girls remained upbeat, positive, and happy, “…these two little girls somehow remained happy, positive and trustful throughout their life probably due their perspective, they saw so much destruction, death, mayhem and despair which others had to face, they felt blessed to be together, and to have survived while others didn’t. Life for them could have been worse, so they took the beatitude of trials as blessings for personal development, what doesn’t kill you will only make you better."

Each one of us will either be a victim or a victor from our experiences.

Everyone will go through the test of fires, no one is excused, living on a broken earth will constitute experiencing a bucket full of sorrows.  We can either make lemonade that others want to buy, or suck on soar lemons that others will want to avoid.

Whining is not dining.

I saw a man with no legs and thanked the Lord for my shoeless feet.

I thank God for my era, my location, my day, my opportunities and for all of my blessings.

Counting blessings is the perspective man needs to survive.

Counting blessings is the nectar God sucks off, it is the sweet aroma that makes its way up to His throne and which releases his love into our hearts.  This is the cause and effect of our faith.