Meeting A Messiah

Meeting A Messiah
By Jonathan Aquino

Saturday Stories

July 6, 2019

I

Richard Bach once wrote, "Here is the test to find whether your mission on earth is finished. If you're alive, it isn't." The aviator and author Richard Bach is one of my favorite people in history, along with Mitch Albom and Og Mandino and Paulo Coelho, because his uses his talent to share inspiration to the world. In personal ways, his novels "Jonathan Livingston Seagull" and "One" and "The Bridge Across Forever" and "Illusions: The Adventures of A Reluctant Messiah" are all special to me. People like him, those who lift his fellowmen, are one of the many reasons why life is beautiful and worth living.

II

After "Jonathan Livingston Seagull" was published and became a phenomenal bestseller in 1970, everybody was asking Richard what he'll write next, but he had no idea. He was a pilot, and he would often go out to small towns and give rides in his Fleet biplane, an open cockpit plane with a pair of wings one on top of the other. Then he met another pilot, also giving rides and flying a white and gold Travel Air 4000 biplane. His name was Donald Shimoda. He had black hair, but I've read the book many times and I can only see Sean Connery and nobody else as Donald Shimoda – who is also the Messiah.

III

As the Messiah, Donald has godlike powers, but it didn't affect him. He had been an auto mechanic, and people from all walks of life had come and gathered in his shop to seek healing and salvation. Donald was born on Earth, and he learned the things we all learn in life, but he also remember the things he learned from other lives, and people respond to that. He went to the countryside but the crowds followed him, so he began to teach. "Within each of us lies the power of our consent to health and to sickness, to riches and to poverty, to freedom and to slavery," he said. "It is we who control these, and not another."

IV

I think that any message about self-empowerment has to be heard. If I were a teacher of men, I would remind them that we have more control over our lives than we think, and that we alone are responsible for the circumstances of our lives – lessons that I also needed to remind myself from time to time. Donald has given Richard the "Messiah's Handbook: Reminders For The Advanced Soul," where the opening quotes comes from. "The simplest questions are the most profound," it also says. "Where were you born? Where is your home? Where are you going? What are you doing? Think about these once in a while, and watch your answers change."

Photo courtesy of eBay