Family Group — Parental Group — Partner Group

Abstract

A woman was dissatisfied with her fate. She was poorer than everyone else. She never had enough bread for her seven children. Her husband had died at an early age. One night, after desperate prayer, there appeared before her an angel who gave her a sack and told her to toss all her sorrows and needs into it. The sack was hardly big enough to hold so many worries, problems, and fears. But the angel took her by the hand and led her, moaning, mumbling to herself, into heaven. When she arrived there, the woman was amazed, for she had imagined heaven to be much different. The clouds were all made of sorrow sacks like the one she had carried with her. And on the biggest sack there sat an old man, a very honorable gentleman whom she recognized from the pictures she had seen as a child. The Omnipotent One knew about all her troubles — after all, he had heard all her prayers and curses day after day. He commanded her to put her sack down, and then said that she could open all the other sacks and have a look inside them. But she would have to choose one and take it back with her to earth. She opened one sack after another and found aggravations, problems, urgent conflicts, boredom, and all sorts of other things like that. Some of them were new to her, others were familiar, and in the case of others, she didn’t really know whether she had ever seen them before or not. With great effort she worked her way through all the clouds till she came to the last sack.