Monthly Archives: April 2013

Love believes in all things.

In 1910 DeWitt Wallace developed a new idea for a magazine. It would consist of a collection of condensed articles and he would call it the Reader’s Digest. He put together a proposed sample and sent it to publishers throughout the country. Nobody seemed interested and DeWitt was terribly discouraged.

About the same time he met Lila Bell Acheson, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister. Before long the two fell in love. Lila believed in DeWitts dream. She wouldn’t let him give up and encouraged him to keep trying his wonderful idea for a magazine. Boosted by her faith in him, DeWitt started mailing circular letters to potential subscribers. In October 1921, Lila married DeWitt.

On returning from their honeymoon, they found a bundle of letters from interested subscribers. Together they worked on Volume 1, Number 1, which appeared in February, 1922. DeWitt Wallace included Lila Bell Acheson as his co-founder, co-editor, and co-owner. Over the years their magazine grew. Now printed in at least eighteen languages, Reader’s Digest is the best selling magazine in the entire world.

DeWitt and Lila were more than husband and wife, they were true friends. They encouraged, supported, and believed in each other. They worked side by side to make their dream come true, and in the process they respected each other. DeWitt once said, “I think Lila made the Digest possible.” I can imagine that Lila would probably say the same about DeWitt.

Yes, love believes all the things. It sticks up for seemingly impossible dreams, cheering as those dreams struggle forward and applauding when they finally come true.

She lay upon her bed wrapped in scarlet hues and white lace. The silk gently laid across her skin and fluttered in the breeze of the ceiling fan. The lazy look in her brown eyes insists that she has been fighting sleep, or has been slowly welcoming the serenity of her quiet surroundings. She lie still except for her right hand occasionally moving her hair away from her face. Every time she did so, she smiled.

The clouds outside were finally parting away so that the moonlight could not shine through the lone window in the room. The only lights in the room were 5 candles spaced out into a cross on her hope chest. The moonlight mingled with a spattering of stars and bathed the room in a paler glow than what the yellow of the candles was originally allowing.

She slid off the bed, wrapping the silk sheet around her as she walked to the window. The lazy look in her eyes was replaced by the reflection of the night sky. Her smile widened as she leaned her head further out the window.

She was looking into the sky when something caught her attention on the ground. A darkened figure on the tree line was slowly walking toward her direction.

She could tell that the figure was large and wore what appeared to be a hooded robe. Though to most, the sight would be menacing, she stood there anxious, almost excited, but not out of fear. As the figure drew closer, she realized it wasn’t a robe, but an over sized hooded sweater. The figure was obviously male just in their stature. Pausing about 15 yards from the window, the man pulled his hood back, but even with the light of the moon and the stars, she could not make out his features.

Her heart was beating so hard that you could see her chest jump under the silk sheet wrapped around her breasts. She continued to stare outward toward the figure and appeared as though she would jump out to him. As she moved her free hand to the window sill, she gasped.

The man who was but a few yards away was now within inches of her window. The moonlight cast at his back caused the shadows upon his face to make him appear as a thick silhouette. The only detail that she could make out on his face was a pair of eyes that were glowing an emerald green with shades of earth woven into the pupil. As she opened her mouth to speak, he was gone, evaporated into the mist that was now flowing into her room.
She leaned out of the window, letting the sheet fall to the floor. She looked as far as she could from that window, but there was no sign of the man, not even a footprint was left in the moist ground. The wind blew gently as if it were trying to push her back into the room.

The chill could be seen running down her entire body as the goose bumps rose upon her skin. She leaned down to pick up the sheet and wrapped it around her. As she turned to move back toward her bed, the tear in her left eye trickled down her face, first burning the skin and then leaving it icy as the breeze blew over it.

As she reached the foot of her bed, she could hear a man’s laugh outside. She rushed back to the window, but the light from the sky only revealed an open field leading to the woods that were a little under a hundred yards away. No sign of anyone there.

She finally crawled back into bed and shut her eyes, seeing the emerald and earthen tones of the man’s eyes who was supposedly right outside her window. The sight made her smile slightly, and then the smile faded away. Her thought was that maybe it was all just a dream.

Elsewhere, a man was sitting on the edge of his bed, looking out his window and wondering why he continued to see five candles in his dreams. The candles, laid out in the shape of a cross, sat on a wooden chest with a lock on the front of it. There was a white, lacy garment laid at the foot of the chest. Somewhere, off in the corner, he could see a darkened red shade, but couldn’t make out what the figure was.

He stood to look out his window at the clear night sky, and off in the distance, somewhere in the middle of the woods that was just over a hundred yards from his bedroom, he could hear what he thought was a woman’s soft, innocent laugh. He smiled, shook his head, looked up at the sky one last time, and then went back to bed.

She woke up in tears with a pendant clasped in her hands. There was a heaviness in her heart, but she wasn’t sure why. As she looked to her hope chest, one of the candles had blown out, and she instantly knew what was wrong. He never woke up.

As she stared out the window the following night, she looked into the full moon and just to the right of it was a star she had never noticed before. It was shining with a power that could have rivaled the moon for the night sky light. It seemed to be winking at her for a moment, and then, just as the man in her window the night before, the star faded from view.

The tears in her eyes were accompanied by a smile as she took a deep breath in. The breeze was once again cool, but she was oddly warm. She looked across the field and could have sworn that she saw someone walking along the tree line, but alas, no one ever showed. She finally made the assessment that it was just shadow tricks from the trees and the moon’s light.

She lay down once again, the stars filling her head.

Hey Logan.

So I know this is random and I hope you don’t think it’s weird, but since you got that Logan On Love show, I figured I’d share my “love story” with you. lol

So I went out with this girl in eighth grade and ended up settling down with her. We went out for four years and ten months. The relationship was kind of an opposites attract type of thing. After like eight months I was like “Why haven’t we had sex yet?,” but she said she wanted to save it for marriage. I was a smoker and she was a drinker so after two years I quit smoking for her because she hated it and she quit drinking so it would be fair. At the 3 year mark I got her a promise ring. However, she was mad it wasn’t an engagement ring and I wasn’t ready for that. It was pretty good and we were like best friends. Three months before we broke up we got matching heart tattoos. And let me tell yah.. It did not look very manly on me. lol But then a month before we broke up a new guy started at her job and they started hanging out and she started back drinking, so I started smoking.

About two weeks before we broke up she spent the night with him to celebrate her birthday and then two weeks later she left me for him. Then I found out she had sex with him that night which was pretty devastating because I respected her decision to wait until marriage for almost 5 years. When I found out, I got a “no love” tattoo to cover up our matching tattoo.. I learned a whole lot from it. That was like almost two years ago. That’s about it, sorry so long and random.

Dear Anon,

I do not think you are weird at all. Thank you for sharing this story with me. I surely understand and relate to where you come from.. I am sorry it didn’t work out between the two of you. That’s a lot of your time invested in loving someone and it turning out the way it did. First of all, she didn’t have the right to get mad about you not wanting to marry yet. I mean, you were so young then and you still are now.I don’t blame you for not being ready for that kind of commitment because there is so much involved with marriage and the preparation for it.

Secondly, I believe it is right to wait for marriage. That is what I am doing, but she obviously wasn’t sincere or she would not have slept with another guy. Seems like she was just telling you that because she didn’t want to give herself away to YOU like that. She probably feared commitment, so in turn she wanted to turn it around on you being the one who was afraid, just so she wouldn’t be the one to blame. And that guy had most likely been in the picture before you knew of him (just assuming). Hense, another reason why she didn’t want to commit to you. Her reasoning probably had nothing to do with marriage, it most likely had to do with her lack of feelings for you, which can be devastating as you have come to find.

Thirdly, you should never have to change yourself and your lover shouldn’t have to change for you unless it’s for better health, which it was, but changing was obviously not something you really wanted to do and I doubt she wanted to either. And if she wasn’t even committed enough to you, she wouldn’t have been committed enough to change as well.. People don’t like altering themselves because they want to feel as if they are good enough just the way they are. Evidently your relationship suffered from mis-communication and un-mutual feelings. I am not trying to explain a bunch of things you may already know, I am just replying and giving my opinion.

Logan,

I was glad to share it with you. I’m glad you can understand and relate. I agree with your opinion a lot. It was a lot of time invested and then that happened. It sucked because I turned down a bunch of girls for her, but it happens. I’m glad you agree on the marriage thing. I only want one marriage in my lifetime so starting this young is too risky. That’s cool that your waiting until marriage, too. I agree very much that lovers shouldn’t change their self . I think that happens a lot and is a big downfall. Thanks a lot for giving me your opinion.

Victor Frankl, a Viennese Jew, was interned by the Germans for more than three years. He was moved from one concentration camp to another, even spending several months at Auschwitz. Dr. Frankl said that he learned early that one way to survive was to shave every morning, no matter how sick you were, even if you had to use a piece of broken glass as a razor. For every morning, as the prisoners stood for review, the sickly ones who would not be able to work that day were sent to the gas chambers. If you were shaven, and your face look ruddier for it, your chances of escaping death that day were better.

Their bodies wasted away on the daily fare of 10 1/2 ounces of bread and 1 3/4 pints of gruel. They slept on bare board tiers seven feet wide, nine men to a tier. The nine men shared two blankets together. Three shrill whistles awoke them for work at 3 A.M. One morning as they marched out to lay railroad ties in the frozen ground miles from the camp, the accompanying guards kept shouting and driving them with the butts of their rifles. Anyone with sore feet supported himself on his neighbor’s arm. The man next to Frankl, hiding his mouth behind his upturned collar, whispered:

“If our wives could see us now. I do hope they are better off in their camps and don’t know what is happening to us.”

Frankl writes:

“That brought thoughts of my own wife to mind. And as we stumbled for miles, slipping on icey spots, supporting each other time and time again, dragging one another up and onward, nothing was said, but we both knew: each of us was thinking of his wife. Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife’s image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank encouraging look.”

A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth—that love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: the salvation of man is through love and in love.