FFWPU Europe and Middle East: Life in Lockdown - The Give and Take of Love

Life in Lockdown. The Give and Take of Love. David and Patricia Earle. Birmingham, UK.

Dear True Mother, We hope you continue to recover well from your operation, and are gradually able to meet more and more brothers and sisters, and of course members of your family. We have been using 2 or 3 very simple ways of keeping a connection to our many friends and contacts, which have allowed us to have lots of wonderful experiences with them, and a ‘give and take of love’ which is often so deep.

One is to remember peoples’ birthdays, with a birthday card, a nice message and a book mark. It’s such a simple thing, but it genuinely makes everyone feel part of our family, and we often get a lovely message of thanks and appreciation coming back to us.

A second is when Patricia sends a nice quotation of meaningful words, on a beautiful picture of nature, or something which lifts people up in a positive way. There are about 800 ladies on her WhatsApp group, and very often many of them send kind words back to her, and it creates such a lot of good feeling and energy for the whole day!

The other thing we have done recently is to visit about 100 of our close Muslim friends during Ramadan, taking them an ‘Eid Mubarak’ card and a small bag of nice sweets for them to eat when they break their fast. It takes about 2 weeks to visit everyone, spread out in different parts of Birmingham. (You may remember that our city is almost 25% Muslim now, with more than 160 mosques). Everyone, without exception, is so happy to see us, and to feel the respect for their devotion and fasting. We keep our Social Distance of course, and chat at the front door, but still the warmth and appreciation for our efforts is really tangible, and deepens our friendship so much. We sometimes come back home with more food than we took to them - somosas, rice, curry, sweets, Eid cake, etc, etc!! It is a beautiful give and take of love, reminding us so much of Father’s autobiography - ‘Food is Love’! Well, that’s all for now. Sending you lots of love, and this little bit of inspiration… Sincerely, David and Patricia