<h3>By Susan Stone</h3>
What in the world have we done to our children? 137 died in Paris over the weekend and 43 the week before in Beirut. According to Wikipedia, there have been 307 terrorist attacks around the world so far in 2015. The death toll has topped 6,650 souls lost to horrific violence. It made my heart hurt calculating those deaths…as I scrolled down the list, I could not ignore the fact that each one of those people had a family…even the bombers and shooters. What in the world have we done to our children? And how can we help?

Last year I wrote an article called ‘Poison Arrows’, perhaps it is timely to recap a portion of that article.

We all send them. Poison arrows are the negative thoughts, words and actions that we put out in to the world. We may not do it intentionally, but we send them none the less. The concept of poison arrows was presented to me for the first time just after the bombing at the Boston Marathon when I was visiting my dear teacher, Rev. Marian Starnes.

During her sermon, she spoke about the effect of our thoughts and words that echoed like the ripple effect of a stone thrown into a pond. Marian described the event like this; my angry thoughts connect to your angry thoughts and join the angry thoughts of others until it builds to the point where it manifests. Then the weakest link in the human chain will act it out…and BOOM, a bomb goes off! Or a war breaks out…or someone gets beat up after school.

The good news is that every time we send a loving thought, say a prayer or help another person, we are sending goodness and love in to the ethers. Energy being energy, it also builds, connects and combines. So when it reaches critical mass, a miracle occurs or someone gets the help they desperately need. It works both ways. Energy isn’t particular or personal, it’s just energy. How we use our energy and what we send out is more important than you could possibly imagine.

Which side are you feeding? It matters! What we think becomes matter…literally. There is no thing you can name that did not begin with a thought. Matter only changes form, it cannot be destroyed. A fire can change a tree to ash and water can dissolve sugar, but only the form has been changed. The same is true with our energy, only the form changes.

Earlier I asked the question, what have we done to our children? The question really is; what are they trying to tell us? They have taken our greed, our anger and our intolerance and they are holding up a huge mirror for us to look at. They are crying out and acting out. They are screaming at the top of their lungs! Are we paying attention? Or do we just want to blame someone else? We cannot solve this by pointing fingers. We must stop and listen. The children are our only hope.

I am not suggesting that we pour sweet tea all over our negative emotions and pretend that they do not exist. We’re human after all and it is natural and healthy to get angry, sad, resentful and disappointed. Imagine though, if you will, how important YOU are. If you knew how much difference ONE person could make…would you forgive a little sooner? Would you say an extra prayer for the children of our world? Would you send out good vibes on purpose? Would you try to help restore balance?

If we keep doing what we’re doing, we’ll keep getting what we’re getting. So let’s try something different…for the sake of our children and our world.