The Begets of Lore and Legend

That same sort of thing happens today. I remember having a friend, pen pal from Japan. Now don’t take this wrong, my father was a very good man in many ways. He was a good father but he fought in World War II and he served in the Pacific Theater. War is hell. He suffered and he saw a lot of good men die, close friends, others maimed for life, thrown into prisons and left to die cruel deaths.) Ten or twelve years later or so I was assigned a pen pal from Japan. We became good friends until my father found out about it. It had all begun as one of those school projects where you write to someone from another land to learn about them and their culture.

My father did not want me corresponding with this person in any way. I was to have no sort of relationship with anyone who was Japanese, in his eyes; they were the enemy though the war had been over for several years. The war wasn’t my pen pals fault and it wasn’t my fault. We had barely been born at the time World War II was going on. We were infants and the innocent. How could any good come out of Japan? My father didn’t know at the time that what he was doing was wrong. You couldn’t have explained it to him if you had wanted to. If my pen pal then had been from France or England or one of our other Allies it would have been an entirely different story.

People are conditioned by society to be and think and feel in certain ways and if you step out of that mold it isn’t very graciously accepted. How could anything good come out of Nazareth or Germany or Japan or currently the Middle East? How could anything good come from that community, that neighborhood, that family? Yet, when you really look at it, there is both good and bad in every Nation, community and neighborhood and family. How could anything good come out of America? There are people in the world who ask that question. Yet we believe we are the greatest nation and people on Earth and in many ways we are very, very good but not in all ways any more than the people, the nations of Jesus Earthly heritage were good in all ways.

We judge whole nations of people, communities, neighborhoods and families by past reputations rather than looking at the individual heart and mind. Maybe in tracing our roots we will learn not to be so judgmental.

It is interesting to learn about the folks who came before you, the famous, the infamous, the heroes, the cowards, the cheats, the liars, the good, the bad, and all those in-between. We all have a few skeletons in our closet. Tracing one’s roots can be very humbling.

It is fun to learn about the lives, the choices our ancestors made and about what life was like in their generations, when they walked on this Earth but they are not who or what you and I are. We are who we are, what we are by the choices we make. We are each responsible for our own individual actions and reactions.

Tracing our roots can be a real eye opener, a good thing. We can learn from our past generations and maybe learn not to repeat the same mistakes or better still, find a role model for good.