Preaching love and tolerance

I have been making great progress on my book again today.  My characters are becoming more and more real to me.  And as I write them, I am seeing things about myself.

All of my characters are flawed. They all suffer from something, and many of them suffer from something that no one can see.

There are central characters in the book, and these central characters, although also flawed, are characters capable of great love.

The characters capable of great love provide the opportunity for healing for all of the other characters.

And that my friends, is my long and short view of life on this planet.

We are all flawed.  We all need people in our lives who are capable of great love.  Those people capable of great love give us the confidence and the courage to try to heal ourselves.

I know that listening to an endless sermon on love and tolerance will usually result in everyone tuning out.

I'm hoping that by creating engaging characters, who are flawed, so can be identified with, and showing them as the instruments of positive change, that everyone reading my books can see themselves as an instrument of positive change.

You don't need to discover a cure for cancer, or write a Pulitzer or Nobel prize winning book, or be president of a corporation to change the world in a positive way.

All you need to do is examine your own brokenness, and realize that everyone is broken in some way.  Then you can reach out to others in their brokenness, and provide love, and reassurance, and support as those people you have reached out to try to heal.

As we seek to understand and support, rather than to dismiss and separate, we appreciate the opportunity for real growth.

It takes all sorts of different people to make this world.  We can't all be the same, we can't all agree.  But I truly believe we can all get along.  We just have to learn to look upon each other with love, rather than with condemnation.

This change in perspective, in attitude, doesn't require that you subscribe to any particular belief system.  This perspective just asks that you look with love on your fellow human beings.  That you acknowledge that you are who and what you are because of multiple experiences and fortunes of birth.  And that all the other fellow travelers through life are who and what they are because of their multiple experiences and fortunes of birth.  And we can all help each other.

I hope that my books will open the hearts of those who read them to be more tolerant, more loving, more understanding, more accepting. And I hope they don't come across as preachy.

What I have seen about myself is that I want to help make the world a better place.  But I want to do it by inspiring others to want to help make the world a better place.

Because I want the change to be bigger than I can accomplish by myself.

But if enough people want to make it better, it will get better.

Love is a better answer than hate.  Laughter is a better answer than anger.  Tolerance is a better answer than fear.

If we can imagine a better world, we can create a better world.

I hope my books can inspire your imaginings.