Just a snip-it, really. If you want the summary, just read the last three paragraphs.
No one and nothing else is responsible for our actions but us. No one can escape the fate of their choices, they can only delay the affect, even then the fate is more drastic than it was before, yet, we still try to out run, out think and out wait our consequences because we are afflicted, we bring the battle of our conflicts to life in how we let them manifest. We can choose to love or to hate, yet there are some who choose neither. They choose indifference. They choose to let whatever outside affects lurking near by control their lives. So many have died without living.
We live in a world of people who are entitled, but will let the man next to them take the fall for something that that man didn't do. We want all the good things without the bad things. We want sex without STDs, we want many sexual partners without the hurt of the numerous break ups awaiting, we want love without working hard for it, we want a well paying job where we do nothing, we want kids without the pain of raising them and the benefits of a policy that we do not obey. The list goes on of what we want and what we do not deserve. We want to be served when we, as the humankind, are meant to serve. We are supposed to love and grow. Be a community, not just a condensed collection of a certain race or races of species.
With growing, growing pains are never far behind. Pain can be good in that respect. When we are children, we eventually grow up. Physically, during our childhood and teenage years, our bones lengthen, our skulls grow larger, our bodies physically grow. It is in these times where we experience pain. They are growing pains. Growing pains are mandatory and inescapable when you grow. The pain can be dulled by things like ibprofen, warm baths and maybe even a nap. The point I am trying to get across, is that it is painful, it happens and it HAS to happen in order for a person to grow.
I think that we, as the people of Earth decided that, we do not like growing pains much and in our day and age, we think that the hard and excruciating labor of a few is well worth our comfort, so why bother ourselves with the troubles of lesser men? But were we not born as equals? Did we not all come from a mother and a father? Regardless of what came after our births, we are brought into the world the same and I do not believe that what we are born into defines us. Whether we are born into royalty, never have a concern about money and live with both parents or born into poverty and abused with one parent instead of two.
It is what you decide to do with your existence that says something about you. I am not fond of the concept of one man being "better" than the other because frankly, who are you comparing yourself to? We are all unique and set apart for a purpose in fields with talents so vast and as countless as the stars. So I will ask again, to whom are you comparing yourself with? No matter the striking similarities in stories or size or cleverness, no man two men are the same when next to the other.
The thought of being "better" than someone else is an illusion and distraction in an attempt to make us forget about the need to love each other. While we quarrel, bicker and make countless efforts to win, we forget about our mothers, fathers, neighbors, cousins and countless others in our search for power. For some of us, power is not our poison. For some, our poison is lust, not just for power or sex, but for materials and experiences of all sorts. Whether it be a pair of expensive shoes or the "babe" next door or a promotion or getting into a college or just anything to dull our physical and emotional pains.
To me, a girl who grew up running around the East coast with her mother and two siblings trying to get away from my scary as all hell and bipolar abusive father, community means family. To me, community means togetherness and love, the taking care of one another. When I searched the internet for the definition of "community" Google and Dictionary.com said "a social group of any size whose members reside in a specific locality, share government, and often have a common cultural and historical heritage." or ."a social, religious, occupational, or other group sharing common characteristics or interests and perceived or perceiving itself as distinct in some respect from the larger society within which it exists"
There is no emotion in those definitions. The word "community" has been shoved into this black and white box to benefit politicians and elementary school teachers. The meaning, the humanity of this word and countless others, has been extracted and put aside for more "important" matters. I know that I am not wrong in believing that people's first priority in life is to love God. Secondly is to love your family. For me, I do no t put "friends" as a category because I see my friends as my family. My God and family make up my community. My friends have family and friends and so on.
I believe that Adam and Eve are the father and mother of all people on Earth. As some of you reading this may have assumed, I am Christian, meaning I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and came to not only die for my sins, but for everyone else's. As a follower of Christ I believe in love. When I say "love" I am not talking about this popular idea of a man and a woman destined to be together forever in a romantic sense. I am talking about the love of your brother, sister, mother and father. I am talking about the glue that keeps people together in a non-romantic sense.
The only definitions I found that were close to expressing some sort of love for "community" was the seventh definition on Dictionary.com stating "joint possession, enjoyment, liability, etc.:" As for the second definition, I found it on Urbandictionary.com. Of all the places! The people (or more likely, person) on Urbandictionary.com defined community as "Something that is to be shared among friends, usually food or drink, and always from the same container."
Out of all of these, the one I agreed with most is the one from Urbandictionary.com. I am not encouraging sharing the same container of things with people of any kind, rather I would like to encourage just the sharing aspect. I apologize to my readers that I have bored up to this point, but I point I do have. Community and family are the same thing. Just like in a community like a city, people pitch in to pick up litter while police officers catch offenders and drunkards. People in communities work hard to make the community a better place to live.
It is the same in a family. The members of a family need to work together as well as for each other out of love to make their dwelling a better place to be. Life is hard. People are bitter, cunning, rude, spontaneous and ridiculous. We, as the human race, are broken. Our hearts need mending and only the Maker of our hearts can fix us. We can try to forget about our brokenness, try to hide it or dull the pain of it by drugs, sex, cutting and so many other things that are temporarily fix our brokenness and dull our pain.
We have to realize that matter is not created or destroyed, that when we take something to try to fix us, that we are not helping anyone. That when we take, we are taking from someone else. The chain of stealing, destroying and killing goes on in our search for a non-God fix. There is always someone to blame, but no matter where we point our fingers, there will always be three fingers pointing right back at us. Eve sinned and so did Adam. Adam blamed it on Eve and God by basically saying "The woman You gave, me made me do it."
And so the blaming cycle began. Ever since the fall of man sin and the pointing of our fingers point to the person next to us. Whether it was their idea, their joint or their apple, it comes down to you. You choose. So, we can go on in this world choosing to let whatever is coming, let it come and screw the consequences, or we can have a hand in the good outcomes by standing up and saying "No more!" Choose to make the change by loving, not hating or being indifferent and whatever it is you choose, you chose. I am not saying that you cannot choose differently, that is up to you, however.
What I want you readers to take away from this is that, firstly, there is a God and He loves you dearly and knows everything about you and wants you to spend eternity with him. God does not hate you. God wants to forgive you, but it is YOUR choice to repent or not. You choose God or you do not. Make no mistake, there is no middle ground. You are either with Him or against Him. Secondly, that you cannot keep going around stealing parts for something you do not know how to fix. You and I, as broken people cannot fix ourselves or others one our own. We NEED God because we ARE NOT God.
Third, that every single person is unique and special because God made each and every person for a specific reason and purpose. No one is a "mistake" and you are ALWAYS loved. Fourth, that you CAN change the world one person at a time. One drop of water into a larger body of water always makes a splash. You can be that chain-reaction initiator and let God keep it going. And lastly, go out there and change the world! Anyone can do it, but it's up to you.
Essay by Sarah Parnes
Read 1230 times
Written on 2014-10-18 at 01:47
Tags Communtiy Grace Love
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Object; to be determined
Teen suicide, where more than two worlds collide. You fight without punches because you have been abused. We as society act like the choice to kill or be killed, the choice to needlessly hit and make the ones that you allegedly love, suffer great pains, is a norm. Now, tell me how long it will take for such hatred of one's self to envelope this already corrupted world. We have control of few things in this life, but what we do have control of is our actions. We choose how to react to situations, regardless of the insane amount of chemicals that plague our bodies.No one and nothing else is responsible for our actions but us. No one can escape the fate of their choices, they can only delay the affect, even then the fate is more drastic than it was before, yet, we still try to out run, out think and out wait our consequences because we are afflicted, we bring the battle of our conflicts to life in how we let them manifest. We can choose to love or to hate, yet there are some who choose neither. They choose indifference. They choose to let whatever outside affects lurking near by control their lives. So many have died without living.
We live in a world of people who are entitled, but will let the man next to them take the fall for something that that man didn't do. We want all the good things without the bad things. We want sex without STDs, we want many sexual partners without the hurt of the numerous break ups awaiting, we want love without working hard for it, we want a well paying job where we do nothing, we want kids without the pain of raising them and the benefits of a policy that we do not obey. The list goes on of what we want and what we do not deserve. We want to be served when we, as the humankind, are meant to serve. We are supposed to love and grow. Be a community, not just a condensed collection of a certain race or races of species.
With growing, growing pains are never far behind. Pain can be good in that respect. When we are children, we eventually grow up. Physically, during our childhood and teenage years, our bones lengthen, our skulls grow larger, our bodies physically grow. It is in these times where we experience pain. They are growing pains. Growing pains are mandatory and inescapable when you grow. The pain can be dulled by things like ibprofen, warm baths and maybe even a nap. The point I am trying to get across, is that it is painful, it happens and it HAS to happen in order for a person to grow.
I think that we, as the people of Earth decided that, we do not like growing pains much and in our day and age, we think that the hard and excruciating labor of a few is well worth our comfort, so why bother ourselves with the troubles of lesser men? But were we not born as equals? Did we not all come from a mother and a father? Regardless of what came after our births, we are brought into the world the same and I do not believe that what we are born into defines us. Whether we are born into royalty, never have a concern about money and live with both parents or born into poverty and abused with one parent instead of two.
It is what you decide to do with your existence that says something about you. I am not fond of the concept of one man being "better" than the other because frankly, who are you comparing yourself to? We are all unique and set apart for a purpose in fields with talents so vast and as countless as the stars. So I will ask again, to whom are you comparing yourself with? No matter the striking similarities in stories or size or cleverness, no man two men are the same when next to the other.
The thought of being "better" than someone else is an illusion and distraction in an attempt to make us forget about the need to love each other. While we quarrel, bicker and make countless efforts to win, we forget about our mothers, fathers, neighbors, cousins and countless others in our search for power. For some of us, power is not our poison. For some, our poison is lust, not just for power or sex, but for materials and experiences of all sorts. Whether it be a pair of expensive shoes or the "babe" next door or a promotion or getting into a college or just anything to dull our physical and emotional pains.
To me, a girl who grew up running around the East coast with her mother and two siblings trying to get away from my scary as all hell and bipolar abusive father, community means family. To me, community means togetherness and love, the taking care of one another. When I searched the internet for the definition of "community" Google and Dictionary.com said "a social group of any size whose members reside in a specific locality, share government, and often have a common cultural and historical heritage." or ."a social, religious, occupational, or other group sharing common characteristics or interests and perceived or perceiving itself as distinct in some respect from the larger society within which it exists"
There is no emotion in those definitions. The word "community" has been shoved into this black and white box to benefit politicians and elementary school teachers. The meaning, the humanity of this word and countless others, has been extracted and put aside for more "important" matters. I know that I am not wrong in believing that people's first priority in life is to love God. Secondly is to love your family. For me, I do no t put "friends" as a category because I see my friends as my family. My God and family make up my community. My friends have family and friends and so on.
I believe that Adam and Eve are the father and mother of all people on Earth. As some of you reading this may have assumed, I am Christian, meaning I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and came to not only die for my sins, but for everyone else's. As a follower of Christ I believe in love. When I say "love" I am not talking about this popular idea of a man and a woman destined to be together forever in a romantic sense. I am talking about the love of your brother, sister, mother and father. I am talking about the glue that keeps people together in a non-romantic sense.
The only definitions I found that were close to expressing some sort of love for "community" was the seventh definition on Dictionary.com stating "joint possession, enjoyment, liability, etc.:" As for the second definition, I found it on Urbandictionary.com. Of all the places! The people (or more likely, person) on Urbandictionary.com defined community as "Something that is to be shared among friends, usually food or drink, and always from the same container."
Out of all of these, the one I agreed with most is the one from Urbandictionary.com. I am not encouraging sharing the same container of things with people of any kind, rather I would like to encourage just the sharing aspect. I apologize to my readers that I have bored up to this point, but I point I do have. Community and family are the same thing. Just like in a community like a city, people pitch in to pick up litter while police officers catch offenders and drunkards. People in communities work hard to make the community a better place to live.
It is the same in a family. The members of a family need to work together as well as for each other out of love to make their dwelling a better place to be. Life is hard. People are bitter, cunning, rude, spontaneous and ridiculous. We, as the human race, are broken. Our hearts need mending and only the Maker of our hearts can fix us. We can try to forget about our brokenness, try to hide it or dull the pain of it by drugs, sex, cutting and so many other things that are temporarily fix our brokenness and dull our pain.
We have to realize that matter is not created or destroyed, that when we take something to try to fix us, that we are not helping anyone. That when we take, we are taking from someone else. The chain of stealing, destroying and killing goes on in our search for a non-God fix. There is always someone to blame, but no matter where we point our fingers, there will always be three fingers pointing right back at us. Eve sinned and so did Adam. Adam blamed it on Eve and God by basically saying "The woman You gave, me made me do it."
And so the blaming cycle began. Ever since the fall of man sin and the pointing of our fingers point to the person next to us. Whether it was their idea, their joint or their apple, it comes down to you. You choose. So, we can go on in this world choosing to let whatever is coming, let it come and screw the consequences, or we can have a hand in the good outcomes by standing up and saying "No more!" Choose to make the change by loving, not hating or being indifferent and whatever it is you choose, you chose. I am not saying that you cannot choose differently, that is up to you, however.
What I want you readers to take away from this is that, firstly, there is a God and He loves you dearly and knows everything about you and wants you to spend eternity with him. God does not hate you. God wants to forgive you, but it is YOUR choice to repent or not. You choose God or you do not. Make no mistake, there is no middle ground. You are either with Him or against Him. Secondly, that you cannot keep going around stealing parts for something you do not know how to fix. You and I, as broken people cannot fix ourselves or others one our own. We NEED God because we ARE NOT God.
Third, that every single person is unique and special because God made each and every person for a specific reason and purpose. No one is a "mistake" and you are ALWAYS loved. Fourth, that you CAN change the world one person at a time. One drop of water into a larger body of water always makes a splash. You can be that chain-reaction initiator and let God keep it going. And lastly, go out there and change the world! Anyone can do it, but it's up to you.
Essay by Sarah Parnes
Read 1230 times
Written on 2014-10-18 at 01:47
Tags Communtiy Grace Love
Save as a bookmark (requires login) Write a comment (requires login) Send as email (requires login) Print text
