Best Friday

 

There is a lot to be grateful for.

While some people may be whining about having to work on Good Friday, I am thankful that I have a job and that I can wear my Colt Brennan Redskins jersey to work on this cool, overcast day.

I am glad that I was able to get a lot of work done yesterday and that the people controlling the information I needed gave me ready access to it.

I am glad that my kids are able to go to school and have the freedom to choose what they would like to do with their lives (I hope they make the most of them!).

I am appreciative that our leaders of religious thought are progressive and inclusive in their practices and embrace diversity as a way of life in a peaceful, creative society.

I am delighted that people are exchanging the right to protest and complain about what they perceive to be wrong for the much more rewarding experience of taking positive action and serving others.

 I am happy that I am faced with such decisions as whether I want to sit in the yellow or blue sections of Aloha Stadium for the upcoming UH Warrior football season.

I am grateful that I can practice my Faith in action and that I am doing it more and more every day.

"Anti-Baha’ism in the Islamic Republic is as old as the regime itself. The Constitution of this regime recognized only a few known religions, and deliberately left out the Baha’i Faith, thus by exclusion making it invalid and outside of any religious category. In practice also, since the inception of the Islamic regime, not only have the followers of this religion [i.e. Baha'is] been deprived of their rights as human beings, but they have also been stripped of all civil rights due to them as citizens of this country.

Many times Baha’is have been subjected to pressure and harm. Their property has been confiscated. Their children have been barred from school. They have been summarily dismissed from work and left without job security. They have been denied pensions and in many cases had to reimburse salaries they had received while working. Their homes and dwellings have been attacked and confiscated. Their places of worship and gathering sites have been demolished and destroyed. Hundreds, nay thousands of them have been arrested and have fallen victim to torture and suffering. More than two hundred of them were executed during the first decade after the revolution. During the reign of the Islamic Republic, apart from political groups, the Baha’is have been more intensely and more bitterly persecuted and suppressed than any other group with a distinct social and belief structure."

Most of all, I thank God for creating human beings who have been able to remain steadfast in the face of complete deprivation of the rights and freedoms we have enjoyed - and pray that their suffering will end soon and that we do not become spoiled, arrogant or forgetful of the Source of all Good.