Ill will?

 “Stop hating each other and start being brothers the way the Great Spirit intended” Walking Buffalo

In 1909 Penn State was 'the most godless university in the country'. Mired in student strikes, class scraps, 'Hazing'_[1] and the supply of alcohol on the campus was plentiful. It was here that Frank Buchman found himself after accepting a job as YMCA Secretary. On 29 January 1908, Frank Buchman had sailed for Europe on the SS Moltke. While in Britain he discovered he had been nursing ill-will having been forced to resign a post earlier in October:

“I thought of those six men back in Philadelphia who I felt had wronged me. They probably had, but I'd got so mixed up in the wrong that I was the seventh wrong man. Right in my conviction, I was wrong in harbouring ill-will. I wanted my own way and my feelings were hurt.”

“I began to see myself as God saw me, which was a very different picture than the one I had of myself. I don't know how you explain it, I can only tell you I sat there and realized how my sin, my pride, my selfishness and my ill-will, had eclipsed me from God in Christ. I was in Christian work, I had given my life to those poor boys and many people might have said 'how wonderful', but I did not have victory because I was not in touch with God. My work had become my idol.”

Buchman's one thought was not so much to forgive those he had hated, but to ask their forgiveness for the way he had behaved. Back at the house where he was staying, he sat down and wrote letters to each member of the Board. One of the letters -, dated 27 July 1908 - has survived in the archives at Mount Airy.

“Am writing,” declared Buchman, “to tell you that I have harbored an unkind feeling toward you - at times I conquered it but it always came back. Our views may differ but as brothers we must love. I write to ask your forgiveness and to assure that I love you and trust by God's grace I shall never more speak unkindly or disparagingly of you.”

IT was around this time that three bits of advice from FB Meyer influenced Buchman:

·         'You need to make personal, man-to-man interviews central, rather than the organising of meetings,' Since that time', remarked Buchman later, 'I no longer thought in terms of numbers but in terms of people.'

·         Meyer also asked, 'Do you let the Holy Spirit guide you in all you are doing?'

·         'But', persisted Meyer, 'do you give God enough uninterrupted time really to tell you what to do?'

His seven years in Penn State provided Buchman with a multitude of stories which he used for the rest of his life. Buchman was no preacher. Where others used emotion or the fear of hell-fire, Buchman used stories. These encouraged the hearer to feel that if other people could become different, then it was possible for anyone. He was a master raconteur, and people frequently said that a story which took him an hour to tell flashed by like ten minutes. At first they were about him but as others began to work with him the stories as frequently centred around the adventures of others. Buchman used stories in an age before films or television, to leave vivid pictures in people's minds.

Buchman set aside the hour between five and six in the morning not just to talk to God, but to listen as well. The central theme of Professor Henry Burt Wright's, (1877-1923), book, The Will of God and a Man's Lifework,was that an individual could, through 'two-way prayer' - listening for guidance as well as talking - find God's will for his life and for the ordinary events of the day. Wright himself set aside half an hour for such listening prayer first thing every morning.

Behrend and Dresser both said to meditate @ 5am. See The Secret?

'Moral and spiritual re-armament. Moral and spiritual re-armament. The next great move in the world will be a movement of moral re-armament for all 1937

Maybe a new moral and spiritual re-armament or re-alignment is needed.

_{[1] Hazing still makes headlines today.}

http://www.frankbuchman.info/