On Life 8 – Homeland – January, 10, 2014

   “I was astonished by words from a reader who commented on an article last week saying: Yes, giving is beautiful, and everyone is now required to give for our homeland because it now needs all of us to give and make sacrifices to raise it; so that it becomes a country worthy of its honorable people and can restore its glorious glory.”

   These words mad me astonished and I found myself speaking about our homeland and our great love for it; such love that we carried since our first years of childhood.

   The homeland means belonging; we are born on our homeland that is embracing us along with our joys, our smiles, our dreams, our pain, and our tears and at the great depths of our hearts we are born with a deep love for our country.

   Some may think in times of distress this love disappears, but this does not reflect the truth; which is known and experienced especially by all who missed Egypt. Every stranger far and estranged from his homeland is still carrying memories of a country he lived in with its traditions even if he disagrees with some; people he knew and lived with them looking for their resemblances at this new community! But he still speaks his language and teaches it to his children in the land of his estrangement. Our love for Egypt, the homeland and our belonging to it cannot depart from our hearts.

Egypt is not like any country or homeland.

   It is the country on which the Bible said to resemble the Garden of God: “… as the Garden of the Lord, as the land of Egypt”. It is the land of wisdom that has taught the world. Still her scientists are trying to discover its secrets and it is the country that God blessed her people: “Blessed is Egypt My people”; it is the country of peace and security that many of the men of God have resorted to. It was visited by Abraham, God’s friend, Jacob and his sons, and Joseph the Righteous, and Moses was born in it. Egypt also received the Holy Family fleeing from the face of King Herod.

   The countries of the whole world has passed through many stumbles, and with the strength of its people, its determination and its challenge, it has taken its place in leading roles among the countries of the world, and Egypt, which has passed through difficult times throughout its great history, has stood up again. Its people since dawn of history, has faced Hyksos toTatars as well as the Ptolemaic dynasty, till the liberation of its land in 1973; its people has tried to face every enemy who tried to destroy or rape their land over time.

   Our country, Egypt, needs us now, especially in these days, to give it all the support we can. I do not mean here only financial support, which is absolutely necessary, but what I mean is the support of the people of their country with positivity and interaction. It is the positivity of the people that should motivate them to support their country with the sincere, sincere and sincere work by which the peoples and nations rise, so that a nation and nation can advance. It must be the motivation to bless the hearts that loved this country, and it worked and was saved and dedicated to it with effort, thought and action.