A bench and a window in every life!

There’s  bench in everyone’s life, where we each sit awaiting for a train to take us to our destiny! Some of us are sitting on that bench with eyes filled with hope, knowing in our heart that the train will arrive any time now. Others are sitting there with eyes full of regrets, feeling that it’s too late, they have missed the train and there is no time left for them to fulfill their destiny. Yet others are sitting on their benches with desperate looks, wondering if there’s even such a thing as a train that will take them to where they wish to be.

These ones are broken, hard trodden and desperate, and they are crying out in their hearts: “Is there anyone out there who can tell me if there will ever be a train that will take me to my destiny? Is there even such a thing as a destiny? Or is there even “anyone” out there?”

There was a young man sitting on one of those benches many years ago, just a little over 39 years ago, to be correct. The bridges behind him were quickly burned, as he struggled through his young life in search for a reason to live. But there he was, sitting on that bench with teary eyes, filled with hurt and desperation, and wondering if life even had any reason to be lived, or whether he should just put an end to it… How did he get there so fast at the young age of 19? He’s still wondering…

There’s also a window in everyone’s life, from where we can look out of our self and see others sitting on some of those benches. We are actually passing by them every single day, but we usually are too taken by our own self thoughts to even notice them sitting there, or to recognize their needs. How sad that is. It seems that it would take so little for each one of us to just open that window and have a look outside… How have we gotten so insensitive?

A middle age lady looked out of her window one day, just a little over 39 years ago. She saw the young man sitting on that bench and heard an inner voice saying: “Invite him for lunch!” He had about the same age of her son, who was serving in the Italian army at the time, so she did not hesitate to answer that call and send her younger pre-teen daughter to invite the young man to come home for lunch.

Two lives, two human beings, two destinies that were about to cross each other’s path. One sitting on the bench, the other looking out the window. One of them was about to leave an inerasable mark on the other one’s heart and memories. What was about to happen that day would change that young man’s life forever and catapult him into his divine destiny! What happened to that lady since then, that’s still a mystery to him today…

Let me tell you the story of that young man and how he had gotten on that suicidal bench, more than a 1000 miles away from his home town, where his parents and brothers lived. He hadn’t seen nor heard from them since he had left, a year and a half before, to start his traveling search for meaning, venturing out “on the road”, as he had read in the novels of Jack Kerouac, the American writer of the beat generation.

Those were the years of the “counterculture” of the 1960’s and early 1970’s, when virtually hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of young people in the western world embraced the hippie lifestyle and left their homes on a search for love and peace, hitchhiking across the nations only to find addictions, loneliness and desperation. I know, I was one of them…

The young man was born, shortly after the 2nd World War had left his home land in rubbles and ruin, in a military barrack of what had formerly been an American army camp. This was left behind by the Allied troupes  that had landed with ships on a nearby seashore to deliver the country from the Nazis’ occupation. His grandparents’ town had been almost destroyed by the full scale bombing that preceded the invasion,so his young parents, who got married shortly after the war, had found nowhere else at the time to set up a nest for their family, but they had eyes full of hope for the future, and lots of dreams to fulfill…

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This is just the beginning of a fascinating story … It’s my “biography”, but it’s not about me! It’s about the wonders God has done in my life, taking me from painful to joyful living, and on to an incredible journey to fulfill my destiny! I believe that, by reading it, you will find clues for your own life, that will help you fulfill your destiny, so don’t miss the next chapters that I will soon publish in the following page: http://renatoamato.com/en/welcome/biography/
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