Explaining the Tribulation to a Child

The Genesis of this article was a recent lunch I had with Jessica, a new member of the Knowledge Mountain Church of Perpetual Genesis, and Elizabeth, her 11-year-old daughter, at a local restaurant here in Reno. It was this encounter that impressed upon me the need for this article and why it must be addressed to survival wellness advocates. They will have a responsibility to act on behalf of the communities for the greater good.

Therefore, this article addresses a unique need for Survival Wellness Advocates as described in my books Survival Wellness Advocacy and the BIG WIN: A Supplemental Guide for Surviving the Planet X Tribulation (You can download the free eBook version at KnowledgeMountain.org) and Surviving the Planet X Tribulation: A Faith-Based Leadership Guide.

With this in mind, I’m going to address in this article those of you who are sensitives in awareness and have chosen to be in service as advocates. Once you have read this article, you will know which children and how to explain the tribulation to them. To get the ball rolling, let’s begin with Elizabeth’s story.

Elizabeth’s Story

Because the membership of our church is spread out across the country, I never miss an opportunity to meet a member that lives in Reno or travels to the area. Whether we meet for coffee, BBQ or Sushi makes no difference to me, because while video conferencing is grand, it’s no substitute for face-to-face get-togethers.

In advance of our meeting for lunch, Elizabeth’s mother told me that her daughter was in awareness and that I could expect questions about what she could do to help her father, who is in denial, to survive the coming tribulation. She also added that Elizabeth would be a box of chocolates. In other words, I would not know what to expect next from her. So, we set a date for lunch.

We met at the restaurant on a cold, gloomy, and rainy day and like the weather, we were all a bit subdued. Yet, it was a pleasant and relaxed get-together. When Jessica broached this issue of the coming Planet X tribulation, her daughter’s response surprised her. Elizabeth said that she believed she would not survive it and that she was resigned to dying in the tribulation. With that, she expressed no further interest in the matter as she obviously saw herself as a dead child walking.

Not wanting to push it, her mother and I turned our attention to a lively discussion about politics and Pleiadians. Elizabeth proceeded to eat her lunch which included a tasty strawberry milkshake with great delight. When she finished, she relaxed on the seat bench as she kept a watchful eye on her mother and me.

I likewise studied Elizabeth as well because it is not every day that I meet an 11-year-old Generation Z child in some level of awareness.

Why my interest?

Elizabeth’s generation is also known as the iGeneration or Post-Millennial. Her mother is a Gen-X adult. However, what sets Elizabeth’s generation apart from that of her mother’s has little to do with the breakup of the American family. Rather, it is their respective proficiency with information technology.

What I observed was that Elizabeth is far more adept at using her mother’s iPhone, than her mother is.

During the conversation, Elizabeth’s mother occasionally searched her iPhone for texts or photos and often in a somewhat uncertain manner. When Elizabeth took hold of her mother’s iPhone, it instantly became an extension of her hand. Like Merlin waving a wand, she knew exactly what she wanted it to do and made it do that without hesitation nor waste of motion.

Keep in mind; I worked in the computer industry for nearly 25 years. One thing I have learned about Gen X and baby boomers is that most have not adapted so seamlessly to information technology as the iGeneration.

Understanding this difference has served me well. Over the course of doing numerous videoconferencing sessions, the adults I speak with often struggle with configuring their webcams and microphones to work with the software. Where Gen X users are a bit clumsy but usually get there, older baby boomers often implode within their own confusion.

When this happens, I always asked the same question. “Is there a 10-year-old in the house?” If there is a 10-year-old in the house, the problem is invariably fixed in short order, so we begin our conference. It always seems to be a simple fix for game box kids.

This is why I eventually told Elizabeth that she must survive because iGeneration children like her will become the single most important generation to reach the backside of the tribulation. A time when survivors will see blue skies and taste sweet waters once again.

I remember how she looked directly into my eyes as I said that. She left me feeling that my words had passed over her head like a wisp of fog and nothing more. Without responding further, she laid down on the seat bench.

It is regrettable that Elizabeth did not show any interest in my comment. If she had, I could have explained that future survival communities will see children like Elizabeth as high maintenance children on the one hand, but on the other as precious crown jewels. The obvious reason is that iGeneration children will grow into young and healthy adults that are capable of starting families and enduring the hardships of tribulation life.

Likewise, so will the children living in poverty in the bottom half of humanity, but unlike Elizabeth, they will be low maintenance. For them, life is already difficult, and the coming tribulation will be a difference of degree. For pampered iGeneration children in first world nations, it will be a dispiriting difference of kind.

So what makes these pampered, high maintenance iGeneration children the crown jewels of our future? There is something incredibly unique and special about them. They are intuitively comfortable with technology. It is how they play, learn and for the most part, socialize.

However, what I find disturbing is how the elites are setting up this generation to fail so they can harvest their healthy bodies for their maniacal aims. We’ll discuss this later, but for now, the key point is that future survival communities will need these children and for a very special reason.

From amongst the ranks of the iGeneration will come many of the future Nikola Teslas of the world, and they will create the next technological Renaissance. This is necessary for our species to achieve a true age of Enlightenment, or as I like to call it, “a Star Trek future.”

So why are iGeneration children the precious seed stock of a Star Trek future?

When it comes to technology, older generations are prone to reciting what is impossible and why things are too complicated to do. Partly because this is what our education system has taught them to do.  They grew up during a time when science fiction writers described to them wondrous futures only their children and grandchildren would see.

Well, much of science fiction is now science fact. Older generations were promised flying cars and felt cheated because such promises appeared to be infeasible. Nonetheless, science fiction has delivered because the iGeneration sees flying cars as feasible (assuming we all live that long).

So, when it comes to debates over what is feasible and what is not, iGeneration children will grow into adults who have no interest in such debates. They will just get it done. For them, technology is an extension of their bodies, and they will learn how to cobble together whatever it is they need to do and complete what they feel they must.

Knowing all this as a technologist and as a catastrophic researcher and author, I left Elizabeth and her mother that day with a great feeling of sadness.

Elizabeth had gone from awareness to resignation. Her life was hard-wired for apathetic and hopeless outcomes. For me, it was like watching a diamond cutter misjudge the angle when cutting a precious diamond of great value and shattering it into modestly salvageable bits and pieces.

The iGeneration and the Tribulation

Elizabeth’s apathy and hopelessness dominated my thoughts for the remainder of that day. That evening I sent her mother a text message. “I’m sad that your daughter feels she’s going to die in the tribulation.”

The next morning her mother sent me a text message that hit me hard. She said that Elizabeth had gone from resignation to denial, saying that nothing would happen.

Now the child had gone through a complete cycle from denial to awareness, to resignation, and then back to denial. This was not about her pessimism, her father being in denial, or just a gloomy day thought. Elizabeth cycled back to denial because this is what the elites have programmed her to do. As will be discussed later in this article, it is so they can harvest her healthy body during the tribulation.

If this sounds shocking, then you have not read what the Guides said in my book Being in It for the Species: The Universe Speaks. It explains the real reason why Elizabeth is apathetic and resigned to failure. The elites are not preparing her generation to fail. They’re preparing them for a feast.

Being in It for the Species: The Universe Speaks
Chapter 3 – Harbinger Events
Authored Channeling with Carlos

Laws will be passed by world bodies, though not by all, extolling the right of the individual to terminate this existence with the assistance of those who only measure the worth of their remains. Lives will cease instantly at the tip of an eager blade driven deep into the skull, an instantaneous end to a perpetual misery of pain, hopelessness, and loss.

Bodies will then be rendered as delicately as those poor creatures bound for the slaughter houses of your present-day reality. It will be fluids here, organs there, each to its own purpose for consumers of this and other worlds.

Brains, genitalia and reproductive organs will be valued by makers of life, and the rest as delicacies and trophies for the pleasure of malevolent life forms for whom respect is reserved only to themselves.

Healthy men and women will forfeit their lives knowing this outcome, in exchange for sanctuary and shelter where their loved ones may endure. As for the rest, death is the only compensation and for these wretched souls, quick payment is all they will seek.

This is why Elizabeth’s apathy and resignation saddened me so profoundly for it is not a fate I would wish upon any generation.

I’ve long known the need to write this article but until now I lacked the resolve for this is a terribly difficult topic to write on.  Elizabeth’s despair changed all that, and this must not stand, and it need not stand because there is a way to right this wrong.

Yes, we can beat these monsters at their own game to a limited extent, and when you’ve finished reading this article, you’ll know how. For that solution to make sense, you must first understand what does not work and why it never will.

What Does Not Work

Writing a book is much like giving a speech in front of a large audience. Public speakers learn to seek out a friendly face in the audience and then mostly talk to that face. This technique helps them to remain calm and focused on their topic.

When I wrote my latest book, Survival Wellness Advocacy and the BIG WIN: A Supplemental Guide for Surviving the Planet X Tribulation, I too was looking for a friendly face. Specifically, it was baby boomer grandparents with Generation Z grandchildren living in ground zero regions of certain death in the coming tribulation. Consequently, their faces were not friendly, but rather, sad and mortified.

Grandparents often tell me of their struggles with two difficult questions. “When and how will I be able to explain the tribulation to my grandchild?”

On the one hand, they are kept at bay by their Gen X children so they cannot initiate a conversation. On the other, they are equally troubled by the possibility of hardening the denial resolve of their grandchildren.

I’ve spoken with many such grandparents over the years. To be frank, none of them can find the answers they seek, and I cannot give them answers that will truly satisfy. This is because they always come at this issue with a self-interested “me and mine” approach where their only concern is for their own families.

Consequently, they often find themselves trying to beat the no-win Kobayashi Maru scenario of Star Trek fame. Unfortunately for them they never beat it, and they never invent a successful way to cheat.

What Baby Boomer Grandparents Fail to Grasp

The grandparents, that I have spoken with and who agonize over their no-win Kobayashi Maru predicament, are as a rule new to awareness. However, the ones who’ve been in awareness since they were young children are not as challenged. In fact, they’ve often done what they could to raise their children with some level of tribulation awareness.

Therefore, we need to delineate who generally fails and who does not.

As a rule, grandparents who became aware when they were young children are better able to help their progeny as they raise them to become aware, or at least willing to consider it. In the process, they can plant the seeds of awareness in their progeny. Whether those seeds bear fruit is another matter.

Conversely, grandparents who are newly aware always fail because one cannot plant a seed in lifeless soil and expect it to grow. The result is that newly aware grandparents are continually at odds with their Generation X children who are in denial and who often have a low or flawed opinion of their parents.

This is why newly aware grandparents are often blocked from doing something effective to help create awareness in their generation Z grandchildren and to relocate them to safety. While parenting is an easy scapegoat, the real causality is cultural defeatism.

Cultural Defeatism

In ancient cultures, family seniors were revered and respected and therefore had a better chance of effecting change through sharing tribulation wisdom.

However, in American society newly aware grandparents are hamstrung. They grew up grew up watching Mary Poppins and labored hard to learn how to say supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. From that, they moved on to Vietnam war protest marches, Woodstock, free love, and other social experiments that inevitably led to an unraveling of American family values.

Stephen Still’s immortal lyric best summed it up, “And if you can’t be with the one you love honey / Love the one you’re with.” That is what happened all too often while the righteous anger of this generation morphed into reckless, self-serving greed and ambition. Then again, let us not paint with too broad a brush.

Not all of these baby boomer grandparents were reckless as parents. Many were good parents and held true to noble family values and raised their children well. Nonetheless, Generation X really did get the short end of the stick. Consequently, for even the good baby boomer parents there was a price.

Gen X children went to school with and became the friends of children often tagged as the “latchkey” generation or “slackers.” They returned home from their school day to find empty houses, parents who, as was the fashion of the day, experimented with wife swapping, and other selfish pursuits.

The bottom line for the American baby boomer generation was that it became flawed to be venerated. This is why the following observation will make sense.

Gen X Denial

It is easy to be critical of Generation X parents refusing the awareness pleas of their parents. However, this is unfair as they are uniquely disadvantaged.

Baby boomer parents grew up in a time when only ten percent of marriages failed, and single-parent homes were an exception. They walked to a neighborhood school in the morning, said the pledge of allegiance, prayed, and knew they had to behave themselves. If they didn’t the school would tell the parents, and that would often result in some form of corporal punishment.

Things are much different today for Gen X parents. If their iGeneration child happens to be under the age of eleven years and returns home from school to an empty house, they could face arrest. If they discipline an unruly iGeneration child with a spanking and this is made known to a teacher, a social worker could very well show up the next day to take the child into custody as the parents are read their Miranda rights.

Consequently, discipline is very different for the parents of iGeneration children. If the child is spanked, they risk going to jail. Likewise, if they fail to discipline their child within the rigid guidelines of the authorities, they go to jail. Their predicament harkens back to the days of Nazi Germany when parents lived in fear of their children ratting them out.

Therefore, Generation X parents are rightfully worried about living in a police state where a disciplinary problem could lead to their arrest and the need for expensive lawyers. Therefore, the motive for blocking their parents from discussing tribulation concerns with their iGeneration children is in part an act of self-defense.

To make matters worse, we live in an outsource economy. With factory jobs fleeing overseas ambitious Gen X parents must typically locate in areas where they can earn a mortgage paying wage. This means ground zero locations such as major metropolitan areas on the East and West coasts. These areas are certain to be unforgiving tribulation death zones.

Bad Choices

In what could be seen as a perfect storm of circumstance, baby boomer grandparents who are new to awareness with a self-interested “me and mine” approach are typically left with three bad choices.

The first is to tilt at windmills. They survive independently of their loved ones hoping against hope that their loved ones will join them while there is still an opportunity. It’s like mortgaging your house and putting it all on 00 on a Roulette table. The odds are 35 to 1 against your progeny evacuating in time. If they fail, you only live to mourn them.

The second is more fatalistic. It’s what I call the death wish option. Grandparents choose to live near their loved ones in denial so they can be with them and comfort them when they die in the tribulation. I call this the B.Y.O.C. option as in bring your own cyanide.

However, the third option is the most troubling. Newly aware grandparents will locate near their grandchildren. Then, when they believe the time has come to take action, they will abduct their grandchildren and transport them to a place of safety.

As a researcher, the only thing I can say about these three options is that on a zero to ten scale for awful options where ten is as bad as it gets, all three are bang on tens.

At this point, you’re no doubt asking yourself, “What about that promise that I’d be shown a way to ’right this wrong?’” The bill is due; it is time to pay up. Let’s get to it.

Righting This Wrong

Brace yourself for a troubling truth.  Up to this point, everything written in this article is tribulation noise. I call it this because at the outset of the Tribulation we are all going to hear a lot of this kind of “me and mine” wailing, pleading, and lamenting. This will result from a lot of people believing that their own wailing, pleading, and lamenting are the transcendent cause. All of this is a combination of “me and mine” foibles and failures.

We often see this in family law courts. Parents and grandparents will appear before the bench and argue their cases before the court each smearing the other and professing their righteousness. Once everything has been said and the arguments made, the judge will render a decision based on what course of action is best for the child.

Therefore, regarding explaining the tribulation to young children, you must be as impartial and fair as a family court judge but with a different focus. As a survival wellness advocate, your mission is to be in service to the community, and consequently, all that you do must be in the best interest of the community you serve. Therefore, because your focus is on what is best for the community, you will do what is best for the children valued by that community.

Finding the Right Children

As people congregate and form communities, you will begin to see three basic types of iGeneration children. There will be high maintenance children who have led protected lives and are not resilient to change, low maintenance children who have led very difficult lives and will adapt to tribulation life more easily, and irredeemable children.

When making your iGeneration choices keep the following in mind.

You Cannot Save Every Child

Irredeemable children are a threat to the viability of any community and will typically self-elect to go it alone. When they walk away on their own, let them go even though you’ll know that their lives will be brutal and short. Otherwise, keep your goodbyes brief and do not share any information with them about the community. Regardless of what may have caused them to be this way, you must consider them as bad to the bone.

Children Who Want to be Reached Can Be Reached

You save the ones you can because even the most fragile or angry children who want to be helped can be reached. If you cannot reach them, someone else with the dedication, background, personality and skills may.

Among these children will be potentially talented and inventive gems and they will be your future technology savants; you can expect them to be a little needy and twitchy at the outset of the Tribulation.

Low-Maintenance Children are Vital for Continuity of Progeny

Any community that is mostly comprised of 50-year-olds and 10-year-olds when it reaches the backside of the tribulation where we see blue skies and taste sweet water once again will fail. This is because the continuity of progeny is an essential need.

Children, who come from low-income families with a good spiritual grounding, may not be technology savants, but they will understand how to make life work in difficult circumstances. These children will be the bedrock upon which you build your continuity of progeny. Therefore, if the community is to survive, there must never be orphans. Children who lose their parents must be adopted within the community and not pushed aside as they are today.

Also keep in mind that procreation in future survival communities will become a responsibility to the community as opposed to the continuation of the bloodline for the purpose of wealth and control. For this reason, it will not be unusual for women to bear children with men other than their husbands because of heavy metal poisoning and radiation which are going to cause a lot of reproductive issues.

As it is, sperm motility and quality for American men have dropped dramatically in keeping with environmental decline. During the tribulation, this situation will become even worse. The point here is that the rules by which we assemble and disassemble families in this country are going to give way to boots on the ground circumstances during the tribulation years.

As a survival wellness advocate, you will help people with these issues, and your confidentiality is essential. Everyone in the community must have complete confidence in your discretion and trust you with the same regard as they would a doctor, lawyer, or a priest.

Likewise, you have something else in common with doctors, lawyers, and priests. They are prepared for the needs of those who seek their services as you must also be.

Be Prepared

As a survival wellness advocate, the last thing you want people in a community to do is to label you a “bullshit artist.” For this reason, you need to anticipate the kind of needs people will present to you so that you can speak intelligently to these needs.

If you do not have a good answer to a question, do not try and be clever. There is an old saying, “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.” The first time you try that you’ll be digging latrines for the rest of your life.

When you do not have a good answer to a question, admit that but also make a solemn pledge that you will find a good answer to that question and that when you do, you will return to that person with that answer.

However, as you begin working with different groups of people, you are going to see recurring patterns of needs presented. Here is where you will need to think like a Third World train station food vendor.

Old trains labor each day on twisted tracks, jostling the passengers on long, arduous, and boring journeys where they make frequent stops at various train stations along the way. The local inhabitants living around these stations have learned to make a good living as train station food vendors.

They know the train schedules and the signs of when they are coming. So to prepare for the arrival of these trains, they prepare delicious baked goods, squeeze fresh fruit juices, and so forth. Once the train pulls into the station and comes to a temporary stop, they offer their wares to the passengers who hold out money through the windows in exchange for the tasty fresh wares.

After the train pulls out of the station, the passengers then can set these little feasts before them and enjoy a refreshing repast as their training continues to bump along the twisted old tracks leading to the next station or destination.

You must also prepare for the kinds of questions children most likely will ask you about the tribulation. Like the passengers on the trains, they will come from great distances, and you will present these tasty treats which they can then take with them as they continue their journey through life.

Keep this analogy in mind as you prepare your tribulation answers for children with serious tribulation questions. How will you know when a child is presenting you with a serious tribulation question? It will be profound and probative.

A child who is struggling with the transition into tribulation life will have very profound questions. For example, “Why is this happening to me?”

An example of an honest response to a question like this could be, “terrible things happen to children and have happened throughout the history of humankind. The truth is, life is cruel and what happens to you or any other child is a matter of time, location and circumstance. Think of all the children who lost their lives in the many massacres that dot human history. Like you, they too wanted to know why it was happening to them. However, the difference between you and them is that you are still alive to ask the question. For this reason, I am very happy that you are alive to ask this question because what you do from this day forward will become the answer to your question and I have faith in you to do the right things.”

If your canned answer was found in a book because you never bothered to think this through beforehand, you would be ill at ease and here is where the probative aspect of the question will eviscerate your credibility.

By nature, children place greater faith in how we say a thing than the thing we say. As we become adults, we learn to intellectualize this process in reverse the order. It is why we are often blindsided by liars. Consequently, those who study speech communication will tell you that as children we get it. How we say a thing matters more than what we say.

So when a child is asking you a profound question that is also probative, the child is asking a question to elicit an obvious body language result.

If you do not know what you’re doing, if you are afraid of the right answer, or in any other way compromised and trying not to show that the child will read you as though you were waving a red cape before a charging bull. Keep in mind; the child is going to be much more nimble in this regard than you.

Families First

As a survival wellness advocate, do not forget that you are a representative of the community you are in service to and these communities will be founded on families. You are always willing to speak with any individual on a one-to-one basis including children. However, you must always state your preference that your first choice is to work with the family as a whole.

In those cases where parents have earned the confidence of their children to engage in frank conversations regardless of how difficult the topic may be, your involvement will typically be in service to the family itself.

However, there will be times when children will come to you for a private conversation. This often occurs when they do not feel they can broach their questions and concerns without being patronized, demeaned, and dismissed or worse yet punished by parents or guardians. Likewise, the children may feel that the parents will respond with one-size-fits-all knee-jerk, boilerplate dogma, and doctrine that will only leave them feeling regret for having asked.

In this case, when a child comes to you with difficult questions the first thing you need to do is to find an appropriate setting. It should be in sight of other members of the community but at enough of a distance that allows you to speak in quiet tones. But before you speak; you listen with wisdom.

Listening Skills

People, who listen well and take the time to make a considered response, are perceived as wise or insightful. Knowing the secrets of the universe has nothing to do with this. Knowing how to listen does. In my article Mental and Emotional Support I offer four simple listening techniques. They are:

“First, there is no clipping. Clipping is when you begin to answer the other person just as they are completing their observation or question. It’s annoying and rude.

Second, there is no anticipation. Anticipation is when you begin to think about how you are going to respond, while the other party is still talking. Consequently, your response will often demonstrate your lack of attention because of your own distraction. When it backfires on you, nothing is more insulting than anticipation.

Third, cultivate the pause. Before responding, the wise always listen patiently, maintain eye contact and pause before responding. The other party perceives this behavior as thoughtful contemplation, and their anticipation of your response will focus their attention.

And lastly, ask the other party confirming questions such as, “It is important for me to understand you. Can you tell me if I correctly understand the following…?” This listening behavior demonstrates a professional attention to details.”

When the time comes to answer the question, never speak to hear yourself. Always speak directly to the concern and choose your words carefully.

A good rule is less is more because the wisest answers help questioners to find a meaningful path to the truths they seek.

Remember, be a train station food vendor. When you finish your conversation with the questioning child, he or she will resume a bumpy twisted journey. When they leave you, they must take with them something tasty that satisfies the soul. Do this, and the next time they come your way, they will look for you and want more of your wares.

Beating the Elites

Previously in this article, you learned that what the elites want to do with our precious young children is to harvest their bodies for their maniacal aims. It is why:

• There has been a methodical process of destroying the integrity of our families over the decades.
• Industry poisons our bodies with unnatural foods and chemical substances.
• The state intervenes in the midst of families to destroy them and separate them.
• The media methodically portrays young children as objects of desire and lust.
• Many women raise children alone without the help of a good father and husband.

I could go on; we both know that. We also know that the point of all of this is that the elites have imbued our children with nihilism, anarchy, and emotional hypersensitivity.  The result of this is they will see their lives as serving pointless ends.

When they are offered death in exchange for the relocation of their families to survivable areas, their pointless lives will then have an acceptable point, and they will surrender their bodies as easily as one would tip a cab driver.

What you must understand as a survival wellness advocate is that all these machinations of the elites are built upon smoke and mirrors. We are only deluded if we participate in the delusion. This is because within each, and every one of us is a small spark of freedom. We want our lives to have meaning, but we must be given the hope to pursue that meaning.

Here is where you, as the survival wellness advocate, must be an eternal wellspring of hope for the future. This is not a Pollyannaish view of how to encourage a child who has been programmed to fail so the elites can easily harvest their healthy bodies during the tribulation. So how do you make this work? You must always have faith in the natural resiliency of children who want to be reached and who can be reached.

Resiliency is the Answer

As a survival wellness advocate, the children you will devote a great deal of attention to will be good children in a bad situation. Each of these children will present their own problems and concerns, and they will each need a different approach. The key is that they want to be reached and you can reach them with love, compassion, and a steadfast commitment to their success.

Here I can speak from personal experience about good children in a bad situation.

When I was 15, my mother and my nine-year-old brother and I were on a long trip when my mother became seriously ill and needed to be hospitalized. We were strangers in a strange town, and yet kind people brought me and my brother to a special purpose orphanage designed to help good kids in a bad situation such as us.

It is the kind of institution you no longer see in America because governments are strained financially and must cut corners. Like our roads and bridges which are in disrepair, the money seems to go for other things and into pockets we never see. But thankfully for me and my brother this orphanage was there. Looking back, the three months I spent in this place was perhaps the three best months of my childhood.

We had been there for a few weeks when another boy my age arrived. I will call him John. He had a long history of failed foster parent situations and wanted to be in this orphanage. We got to know each other, and I learned John’s story.

When he was 11 years of age, he was upstairs sleeping when he was awoken by the sound of a shotgun blast. He ran down the stairs, and the first thing he saw was his mother’s brains scattered on the wall and blood everywhere. Then he looked at his father in time to see the man stick the shotgun barrel in his mouth and pull the trigger. It was a brutal murder-suicide that would forever shape the remainder of his life.

Other children would’ve become angry, sullen and combative but not John. He had a good bead on things, and I could see that. He wanted to have a successful life, and he knew he needed the help of others to achieve that.

We became good friends but did not spend that much time with each other because I was dealing with my own grief. Rather than moping about, I worked, and I worked hard.

The orphanage would allow you to do tasks like gathering laundry and kitchen duty in exchange for toy closet points. This wonderful little closet at the back of the play area stuffed with all kinds of wonderful toys. Children who were responsible and helped to maintain the orphanage by working jobs could exchange their points for their choice of toys in the closet.

To be honest, I wasn’t interested in the toys. I just wanted the work because for me the work was therapeutic. I didn’t dwell on my mother’s infirmity or my situation. It just kept me busy, and I was grateful for that.

A few weeks after John arrived, a young girl of 14 and her brother of 10 arrived.  They came one evening while all of us children were in the common game room. I will call them Lucy and Thomas, and we were shocked when we first set eyes on them.

A meter reader had discovered them locked in a basement. Their parents had kept them there for over a year and barely fed them enough to sustain life. The two children were as white as ghosts, gaunt, and frail. They looked as though they had just walked out of a concentration camp and they were terrified.

It’s a funny thing about being in an orphanage for good kids from a bad situation. When you’re in that situation, you know how painful life is for other kids, and so the last thing you would ever want to do is bully another child. Ergo, you empathize with their pain and sorrow and want them to be happy.

After the social worker had left Lucy and Thomas in the play area, the rest of us children went up to greet them.

Instead of warm smiles and handshakes all around, the two ran to a corner of the room and huddled together in fear. The terror in their faces stopped all of us dead in our tracks, and we knew what to do. We all just moved away and went about our business out of respect for them and for what they were going through.

A month later, Lucy and Thomas were just as healthy and happy as any other child in the orphanage. You would not have known the horror they had gone through to look at them. It was about this time that I noticed Lucy and John starting to spend time together. I would occasionally speak with them, but as always, I was so busy doing all my volunteer work jobs that I didn’t have much time to speak to anybody.

You know; it amazes me. I enjoyed gathering dirty laundry back then which is something I certainly do not enjoy with such eagerness today. Nonetheless, time passes on, and my mother healed and was ready to return home.

My sister flew in and retrieved our car from storage and came to the orphanage to pick us up for the trip home. She left the car in the orphanage parking lot while she attended to other matters, so I could get the car interior cleaned and ready for the road.

In the process of doing that, I found half a pack of cigarettes. Oh my, this was a find, and I stuffed it deep into my pocket knowing exactly what I wanted to do with it. I would give it to my friend John as a going away present.

As fate would have it, I went into the main hall, and there were John and Lucy sitting together before a small table. They were supposed to be hall monitors, but they look like they were mostly monitoring each other. I walked up to them and carefully placed the cigarettes on the table top and slid them under my palm across the table into John’s hand. I winked, “Thought I’d leave you with something before I go.”

He was appreciative of the gift but slid the package of cigarettes back across the table to me. What happened next was one of those timeless moments in one’s life that can never be forgotten.

John first looked at Lucy. I could see the concern on her face. Then he turned his head and looked at me and said, “If I get caught with her and cigarettes, I’ll be kicked out of the orphanage, and that will be bad, but the worst part is that I will lose Lucy. I just won’t do that.”

He then turned and looked at Lucy again and what I saw in their eyes was the most beautiful love between two human beings I have ever seen in my entire life. They had both come from  awful circumstances, and yet, by the grace of God, they found in each other a deep human need for companionship.

Years later when I was in college, I worked as a wedding photographer, and I photographed over 150 weddings. I can count on one hand the number of brides and grooms who looked at each other on their wedding day with the same kind of love that I had seen John and Lucy share in that orphanage that day.

After we had exchanged a few kind words, I left them on the table to return my room to get my suitcase. On the way, one of the social workers in the orphanage came to me, and she said, “You have not used your toy closet points.” I shrugged my shoulders. It didn’t matter to me. “But don’t you want your toys?”

I thought about it for a moment and asked, “So, what can I get with all my points?”

The social worker answered, “No child in the history of this orphanage has ever accumulated these many points. What do you want?”

I thought about that for a moment and remembered seeing something in the toy closet that had caught my attention early on. It was a large box of kites, and I remember that they required a lot of toy closet points. “Do I have enough points to buy that entire box of kites?” I asked.

The social worker smiled and replied, “Just enough. But why do you want them all?”

“I just do,” I answered knowing why. “Can I have them now?” She agreed, and we walked to the closet, and she took out the entire box of kites and handed it to me. With that, I walked out to the main playing field where all the children in the orphanage were enjoying a recess. It was a nice breezy day and the weather was fine.

I walked to the center of the field and called all the children to come and started passing out the kites. The children asked me if they needed to return the kites to me when they were finished with them, and I told them that the kites were theirs to keep and that I hoped they would enjoy them. When the box was empty, I walked back to my room, picked up my suitcase and joined my sister and brother in the parking lot.

I looked for John and Lucy along the way but did not see them again, and as we drove from the orphanage to the hospital to pick up our mother, I wished that I could have seen John and Lucy one more time. I also wished that I could have stayed long enough to see all of those kites flying over the orphanage. However, it is only in my imagination that I can see those kites flying high in the sky. Perhaps, that’s better than the real thing.

What I learned in that orphanage is that children are resilient, and it does not matter how maniacal and horrible their lives have been, or how twisted by the influence of self-serving elites; they can turn it around if you just give them a chance and reach out to them in a loving and compassionate way.

So, looking to the future, I look forward to the time when I’m having a quiet conversation with a young iGeneration child, like Elizabeth, who inspired me to write this article.

I would like to imagine that she survives the tribulation because she is resilient and now as a young woman is a dynamic member of a thriving community. But when she is in that initial transition from life as we presently know it to the rigors of tribulation life, it would be nice if she asks me the question, “What will we do when we reach the backside and see blue skies and taste sweet water once again?”

I know the answer to that question. When that day comes, my answer will be “let’s go fly a kite.”

Tags: preppers, social programming, survival, Survivalism, tribulation

Category: Humanity