I write this about you, "Irene," and to you — and to everyone who says: "Chivalry has gone out of people, and the bonds of kindness and mercy between them have snapped." Or: "These days a person has no dear ones or friends but his own family and relations." Or: "Human friendship has become lies and falsehood!"

No — there are still in the world souls that shine with loftiness and tenderness, pure and loving hearts whose fragrance is stronger than the fragrance of lilies. They are scattered here and there, in the East and the West, in village and city, on sea and on land — and even between earth and sky!

It was evening, and I was waiting in the airport of Curaçao for the arrival of the plane that would carry me to Lebanon, where I was to spend a year, recovering some of the health and strength the tropical climate had stolen from me. I was sad and aching after taking leave of my husband and my brother at the airport of Barcelona, Venezuela. I needed no mirror to see my disheveled hair and my reddened, weeping eyes; as for my arms, they hung slack from sheer fatigue, with no strength left to play with my baby, who saw fit to proclaim his displeasure and his boredom by crying — so I let him cry, my spirit bewildered, loneliness and desolation closing around me. Suddenly I found my arms lying slack over my empty lap! Where had my baby gone? I turned my gaze and saw his abductor: a lady with a laughing smile, carrying him away from me and motioning with her hand that I should be easy

and rest! God Almighty had sent me an angel to carry my angel and lift away some of my distress!

I rose and went to the rest room, washed my face and tidied my

hair, then drank a glass of orange juice. Before long I felt refreshed in body and spirit, and I returned to the waiting hall all eagerness and longing to shower that generous lady with a torrent of words of thanks and gratitude. I found her sitting calm and serene beside a small girl, cradling my baby, who lay nestled in the folds of her arms! She greeted me first, saying: "Thank God

A world brimming with surprises... but may it rightly be left unknown to the child, so long as he is a part of it?? The decision in this matter rests with the parents.

There are parents who go to excess in their love for their child and their protection of him, painting life for him as easy and pleasant, without a single difficulty running through it — and how quickly the opposite proves true, when it becomes clear to the child that life is struggle and strife!

The child sometimes oversteps his rights, so that he fetters his parents' freedom: he prevents his mother from visiting her friends because he does not care to go along with her and prefers that she stay with him — and the two of them, carried away by their affection, bow to his wish. Beginnings like these will lead him in the future to abuse his own freedom, and the reality he touches in the world will strike him hard — for what a difference between his parents' tenderness and the harshness of other people!!

A child is bound to make many slips in his life; if his parents pardon him out of tenderness and affection, he will find in life thereafter neither a pardoner nor one who shows mercy. How far is the stern law from his parents' loving embrace!

The best training children can be raised on is hardiness and the storming of difficulties with an open heart. For how is a child to handle some problem with understanding and good sense when he has never been accustomed to it before? It leads him then into embarrassment — and what an evil this state drags upon him, at times, in a feeling of inferiority.

The child's having acquaintances and friends greatly eases the parents' task in this field, for through mixing with them he discovers that each of them has rights and duties, and he learns that God Most High has granted every individual differing gifts. He discovers likewise that life is take and give: he cannot win his companions' affection if he does not respect their rights, and he in his turn cannot keep their friendship unless he meets them with the like.

Parents must raise their child to love struggle and to face the difficulties of life — not by tyranny and injustice, but by right guidance, and by true love founded on reality, not on destructive sentiments.