I was really touched when I was driving home from an evening with Kyle McNeil, learning how to write a blog and how to set up a blog. Kyle had us commit to writing our first blog post by this Friday at midnight. I was thinking that I would write about the fruit trees that I have growing in my yard and all the different kinds of fruits and berries that I have growing.
As I was driving home I was thinking about a piece of work that I did for one of my friends last week. I was also thinking of how my real purpose is to write about things that have much more significance than the fruit trees growing in my yard. I was thinking of the work that I do, the work that I was meant to do and how some people carry patterns or are tangled up in things that they can’t possibly identify and undo for themselves. The reason I was thinking about this particular piece of work was that there was no way that anyone I knew would be able to untangle this for themselves.
My friend, I will call him Mark, (not his real name) had a sense that there was something between him and being really able to engage with his career, which affected his ability to do well financially. What revealed itself in his work was a pattern that started in his family with his grandparents generation, was passed to his father and Mark picked it up from there.
The story that shared itself was deeply touching. In the First World War Mark’s ancestors fled the village in Poland they were living in. One member of the village stayed behind to delay the coming soldiers and make sure that the rest of the village had time to get away. He sacrificed himself so that the others could get away and live. He died so that they could live.
He saved their lives, at least that was the perspective of Mark’s ancestors towards this person. Mark’s ancestors saw this as a debt that they could never repay. So because they had been given something so huge, the only way they could try and balance this huge gift, was to limit how fully they lived life. “How can we live fully when you died” In this way they were able to limit or make smaller what they had received.
This pattern of not living fully, of not taking the full gift of life, was passed down to the next generation and then Mark learned this pattern as well. The person who stayed behind so they would have the time to flee was also not talked about in Mark’s family because it was painful to remember what he had done. They felt there was no way they could repay him so they avoided remembering him.
When a person saves an others life there is a bond that is formed between the one that lived and the person and saved him. The one that is saved owes a debt to the one that saved them. When the person that saves another gives his life so the other may live, then an even stronger bond is formed. The one that lives is left owing something they can never repay.
In this case the one that died would’ve wanted those that live to make the most of the gift they had received, to make the most of their lives. In the work the sentence from the one that died to those that lived was “honor me by living fully”. This allowed those that lived, a new orientation for life.
Mark was able to see both, that to live his life fully was to honor the memory of the one that died and that it was not his debt to repay, it belonged to his grandparents. He was able to let the debt rest with them and move more fully into his life.
In the two weeks since this piece of work, Mark reported feeling more energy in himself, particularly in his legs, the part of himself that would hold him up and support him in life. Mark also reported that had more energy for his career, things were going better and that he had completed two large sales that had been stalled for some time. His other proposals were generating considerably more interest.
I was deeply touched by the deep sacrifice of the one stayed behind, so the others would have time to get away, knowing he would be killed. I was also touched by how his gift had affected those that survived and how their pain for his loss had affected them and their descendants.
Mark read this article and gave me permission to share it.