The power of home. Have you thought about the strong influence of home in your life? Perhaps “homemaker” doesn’t have the sweet, fulfilling ring that it had in 1950, but the blog today shows the power of home to unite and bless in all decades. My colleague, Ingrid Peschke, writing for the March 1, 2016 edition of HuffPost Women, recounts courageous acts of women who valued home and felt its healing power. Here’s Ingrid:
It was one of those moments when you recall where you were as the news broke.
Everyone’s worst nightmare was being realized as a catastrophic accident in a nuclear reactor launched a plume of highly radioactive fallout. The fire that raged at the Chernobyl power plant for four days released 400 times as much radiation as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. And it paid no heed to national boundaries as it drifted across the Soviet Union and over large parts of Europe.
But the most immediate impact of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster was on the lives of over 160,000 locals evacuated from their homes to live safely outside of the so-called “exclusion zone.”
Yet a group of brave residents decided nothing would keep them from the place they called home. Instead, they dug beneath the barbed wire and returned to their ancestors’ homes inside the zone. One woman summed up her conviction this way: “I am more afraid of starvation than radiation.” These were people who had survived Stalin’s dictatorship and the hardships of communism and war.
Filmmakers Holly Morris and Anne Bogart documented the story of the 200 remaining “self-settlers” made up of mostly Russian grandmothers in “The Babushkas of Chernobyl.” The movie shares a remarkable window into the lives of these women who have not only survived off of land that radiation scientists labeled uninhabitable and extremely toxic, but appear to have thrived on doing so….
…another woman, from another century, would have understood.
“Pure humanity, friendship, home, the interchange of love, bring to earth a foretaste of heaven,” wrote revolutionary spiritual author and teacher, Mary Baker Eddy. “They unite terrestrial and celestial joys, and crown them with blessings infinite.”…..