Does a story have two versions? Does a story have one version with two viewpoints? I have a story to share of a recent turn of events. A story with two perspectives, and I am not sure at the moment which view, if either, is the real one. They both may be true and they are both may be false. Depending on how you look.
This story is told two ways, is one way is a string of coincidences, and the other way is an intended series of events. Is this story a chain of random events, or is this story an intended course of coincidences which are too disparate not to have divine intervention manipulating events to a desired outcome?
I will start with the version which started some weeks ago.
I have a family member who works at a school which happens to have an apartment complex across and some distance down the street. This apartment complex of has many children which go to the school, a Vista Worker who is working to improve the lives of people in the neighborhood, an elderly woman.
The Vista worker somehow meets my relative. They are at least, two professionals with a similar dream for the neighborhood. A third person is already present in the story. The third person is the retired individual who has put in a request to the Vista volunteer worker for a computer tutoring class.
However the conversation came up, the family member mentioned I did computer tutoring as a volunteer in the past. The Vista worker asked the family member if I would volunteer to hold computer classes for the apartment complex families. The request was passed on to me, and I agreed to volunteer a few hours a week for computer tutoring sessions.
My first volunteer session brings one person to class. The retired person, who also owns a computer, but does not know how to use it. Unknown to me, they have a burning desire to accomplish a singular task, and they need my help. The retired person is a licensed Minister who has something very important to share with the world beyond everyday ministry. They want to share their vision using a computer, as that is the easiest way to reach the most people.
Here is the second version which is a little different.
 A retired person who is a licensed Minister, who is also is a self proclaimed Prophet of God, receives direct albeit sporadic communications from God, was once given a visit to heaven. Afterward, acting on direction from God, they wrote down their experience, and some additional things they were shown or told. It was rewritten a few times, and sent off to one or more publishers for publication. The result to date is poor at best with very few copies sold.
Seeing this dismal result, God sets into play a string of events which brings the retired person cum Prophet and myself together via a computer tutoring session. In the course of the first session the Prophet sends their first ever email to a Christian broadcasting network. A strongly worded expectation, the network needs to read the Prophet’s book.
The second computing class hour with the Prophet, and the rest becomes clear. This Prophet of God in the clothing of a computer illiterate retired person, wishes to get their story into the hands of as many people as possible via the internet having only the vaguest idea of what the internet is and how the internet works.
It appears to be my duty in the process to assist the Prophet to help get their story out.
End of chapter one. Seen from one perspective there is this string of joined coincidences that benefits a retired person cum Gods Prophet.
From a second perspective, God arranged a number of seemingly unrelated life events so the possibility of a certain outcome could occur. God rolled the dice. My bit part is, I have a blog, some understanding of the internet, and how it works, and have some time to spare each week to help an aging Prophet complete their God given directive.
So now, I am unsettled about this situation. Was there indeed divine intervention, and is this the result? Or is this only a string of unrelated events, and the outcome is simply a coincidence, and no more?
I wish to know, what do you think? What in your opinion is real. What you would do if you were me?
How many people do you know who are unhappy with their lives? Some days it seems to me that more people are unhappy with their lives than are satisfied, let alone happy with their life. Usually these are people up to their late thirties. They are miserable. They feel locked in, chained down, and find little to be happiness from one day to the next.
I think it is too bad so many people feel this way. They do not like their looks, what they do for a living, where they live, and what car they drive. They do not like their body, their face, their teeth, their hair. These desperate people spend a lot of money on fast fixes, and instant gratification products. They buy products for the top of their head to the end of their toes, and they still are miserable.
So what do they do? They repeat the cycle over and over again. Maybe the hair color was not quite the right shade, the toothpaste does not get their teeth white enough. They go to parlors and have their body hair removed. After all that, it still does not help. Many people who have done all this feel just as bad as they did before they started the process.
If you ask them, they won’t admit it, but they feel like fakes. From the moment they wake up in the morning, to the time they go to bed at night they wear a mask covering up the real them. They worry down deep that at any second they might be exposed for what they really are. Every time they meet a stranger the fear wells up. Any stranger might look deep into their eyes and discern their secret.
Gosh, it must be horrible to go through each and every day in a situation like that. Knowing no matter what you do to improve the way you look, your hair color or hair style, or having your teeth re-whitened it you wake up unhappy. I first noticed this behavior in teenage girls when fitting in is more important than feeling good about yourself. As long as young women fit in, the down deep feelings do not matter.
Of course when I observe the men around me, I notice the same type of behavior. Young men growing into middle age, still making sure they fit in. It is rare to find a man who does not talk only about safe preferred topics. Once the top four or five of mens favorite subjects are talked though, the conversation begins to lag. It is the fitting that matters for men too.
Yet every neighborhood is overflowing with people who are unhappy with their lives and themselves. Men and Women living the American dream, and they are not satisfied with their lives.
I do not understand why they remain this way. The way to have a happier life is not some super secret, buried in some dusty old book. The key to a satisfying life is to start living life for yourself, not for other people. It is that simple, live your life for yourself, and the rest will fall in place. The hardest part of starting to be happy with your life is starting.
After so many years of doing the same things, talking about the same subjects, not letting anyone see your weaknesses, or the idea that you have an interest in something other than popular shallow conversation, it is very hard to change. Most people have been living imitation lives for so long, they no longer remember that once upon a time they liked themselves, and they really enjoyed hobbies and interests that others did not.
It is easy to change, take ten minutes today and think about yourself. Think about something you enjoy that you have not done forever. When you wake up tomorrow, take another ten minutes and do it. Being happy can be that simple.
When we pause long enough to look back over our life, we like to assess how we think we are doing. We look at our accomplishments and satisfy ourselves that we are somebody because we have completed some number of trials and tribulations successfully over the years, while others we choose to compare ourselves to have not.
We like to prim ourselves, fluff up our feathers, push out our chest, and strut around hoping someone will notice. If no one notices that is all right too, because we at least know how good we are. We know how well we have done in the face of adversity, overcoming obstacles and proving ourselves while other watched. It really does not matter though except to us and what we think of ourselves.
I stumbled upon a good analogy of our true worth some years ago. We have all heard about how we can stick our hand in a bucket of sand or water and splash it or move it around and shape it to our liking. Of course we know when we are all done and we remove our hand, it is like we were never there to start with. My observation is from a different perspective
I was watching an ant hill a number of years ago and I saw what our real importance is through the ant colony. If you have ever watched and ant colony at work, you know they have there set trails they follow initially when leaving the ant hill. In the morning as the sun warms up the colony hundreds of ants follow trails out to some end where once upon a time a lucky ant found a food or water source.
Usually the food source has long been forgotten and once the ants reach the end of the trail they start foraging in what appears to be a wandering pattern. If they have particular destinations in mind, I have not deciphered how they work. So out away from the hill there are all these ants working away, walking all over trying to find food for the colony.
At the nest there are other ants whose job it appears to excavate new tunnels. You see them walking out one of the tunnels to somewhere at the edge of the ant hill with a tiny pebbles in their pincers, or maybe a clump of dirt. They walk out near the edge, drop whatever they are carrying, and walk back in to do it over again.
I am sure there are many more ants who each have individual jobs in the colony of which I am unaware. As the day progresses, all the ants go about their tasks and the whole colony enjoys the benefits of the communal work. As I watched the ants working away, it dawned on me that even though they were working towards a common goal, they were not in any apparent way attached to each other.
When I removed an ant from its task whether the ant was foraging, hauling tiny pebbles from far below, or smoothing the ant hill and possibly reshaping it, the loss of a single ant was not noticed, or so it seemed. In fact unless I disturbed the ground there was no notice of an ant disappearing from its appointed task.
In reality so it is with us. If something appeared and took one of us from where we were sitting reading this, not too many people would notice that we were missing. After a few hours, it would become noticeable to those close to us we were not around at that time, but for the majority of the community, the loss of a single person is really a non event.
So when we are looking back over our accomplishments, and puffing ourselves up and feeling important, we also need to take a few moments and reflect on the truth. Are our accomplishments something that really make a difference to our community, and improve the quality of life for everyone, or are our accomplishments of a singular nature, in that they only benefit us?
Hopefully by the end of our lives we will accomplished many things that stand out in our mind as something that was really worth doing, and not a something that was important only to us. If we spend our lives doing those things that are only for us, we are like the single ant I removed from the ant hill. Nobody will really notice the difference, and our feeling of self worth will feel a little hollow to us.
On the other hand, if we some memories of how we made life better for the community or someone in it, we have fueled fires that will continue to burn in peoples memory’s long after we are removed. These changes need not be something that changes the very foundation of civilization, but may be something more humble and simple. Generally the more humble and simple whatever it is we do, the more it is appreciated by those people we do it for. Making life better for others, has a bonus of enriching our own life.
I think we all have this wrong think going on in our lives. We usually have enough information to make the right choices but for some unknown reason we do not. I believe George Orwell first used Wrong Think in his book 1984 which was a look into one possible future for mankind from the invasion of technology. It is probable however that the term was used before it made it into the book.
So how do we wrong think? The most obvious examples are in the state of our health and how we approach the things we do. I know my habits started becoming worse when I became old enough to drive, and fast food was still a novelty. I started walking and riding a bicycle less, driving and eating greasy foods more often.
Over the years we become accustom to adding to our lives and not taking away. Our life style gets better, our food gets more expensive, and in general we have more extra money to spend on ourselves, so we do. We buy better clothes, place to live, and start eating more things that we really should not be eating so much of. That was one of the things I found myself doing, something to eat that once was a treat was now a semi regular activity, and my weight was showing this to be true.
When you are young, your body is pretty resilient, and it can deal with the stresses we place on it from poor health choices. After the kids leave home, our body still does a good job of recovering from years of abuse, but we have to help it a little. I decided it was time to help mine but the impediments to that were and are quite a challenge. I think that is where wrong think gets a foothold in us.
We look around for options to make ourselves better, either in health or in how we feel about ourselves. For some people it is spa’s and lotions, for others it is the gym, and for others…they turn to denial. For a few it is a total remake of parts of our lives. What makes it so hard is we forget over the years the basic things that we need to stay healthy. We gave up on exercise generally as soon as we did not have to exercise. The meals we are eating is not even close to what they should be more often than not. Eventually we start to look around to fix ourselves.
We hear or read about a few things, probably another food, some vitamin or supplement that someone we know takes and has good success with. We find that they are not giving us the expected results so we keep looking. Wrong think is rampant at this point. We go to salad bars as they seem to be healthier, but once the counting is done, all we have done is add salad to the excess food we are eating. Maybe we try diet drinks, or light meals as a substitute for one of our regular meals. By this time we are skipping breakfast because we know we have to eat less.
If we are lucky we get to the point where we have to admit that everything we are doing is wrong. Once we realize everything we are doing is wrong, we start to look around for what we really should be eating, and doing to keep ourselves healthy. We start replacing one food for another, or dropping certain foods or types of foods completely.
Finally we start to see the results we know we should be experiencing. We have broken the cycle of wrong think, and now are practicing Right Think, and now are really learning about how to make ourselves healthier once again. Hopefully we stay on the path. We wrong think many things in our lives from the time we get up to the time we go to bed. Wrong think is so easy because it is how most of the people we know think, and they can’t all be wrong can they?
I am sure you have heard, or read the (possibly mildly offensive to some) joke about the young bull and the old bull? In a cleaned up version, two bulls on top of a hill see a group of cows in the valley below. One, a young bull, being young, wants to rush in and mate with one of the cows. The old bull wants to walk down slowly, and mate with a number of the cows.
This joke is probably thousands of years old. There was a form of it in the movie, ‘Fried Green Tomatoes’, in the parking lot scene. It is also a premise in many other books and movies. At the end of all of these, the logic is immediately apparent: Why waste energy on small stuff when there are more important matters coming up? When you are older you will have more to contribute. While youth is great it is not the end all of existence, there is much more to life.
We should be who we are. When I was younger I enjoyed knowing there was someone around who was older and had more life experience than myself. I could go to and use them as a sounding board to help me through a hard decision, and present choices I had not thought of. I have never wanted to live in a world like that of Time machine, Logan’s Run, Brave New World, or any of the other books and movies where young is all there is, and life is controlled. Where and once you reach a certain age, you disappear. That’s not living, thats a lie in action.
It is a disservice to younger people to be much older, and try to be one of them. A much better tact is let someone younger than yourself be younger, and you be yourself at your correct age. There is much more to be gained from the relationship, and more satisfaction for both parties.
Take advantage of your life knowledge and life experience, to help young adults make the world a better place rather than helping them repeat the same mistakes that have already been made. If you are a young adult, take advantage of your enthusiasm, and energy to make the world a better place, but stop once in a while and ask directions.
No one would seriously argue the generally hasty decision making processes of some young adults. They do things on an instant. They are driving to a friends house, and they show up late, but with a new car. They push too many limits, and sometimes they pay a tragic price, either in themselves or the harm they have done to someone else. Thankfully, our society is set up in such a way, the damage they can do is limited.
There is a reason why people must meet a certain age requirement, either by law, or by general consensus. The reason for an minimum age, is peoples life experience, and decision making abilities have to be at a certain level before they can be effective in certain life roles.
I think it is a disservice to yourself, and young people, to be much older pretending to be young. A much better tact is let someone younger than yourself be younger, and you be you. There is much more to be gained from life, and more satisfaction for everyone. Take advantage of your life knowledge and life experience to help young adults make the world a better place rather than helping them repeat the same mistakes we did.
If you are a young adult, take advantage of your enthusiasm, and energy to make the world a better place. There is a lot to be said for youth, and there is a lot to be said for the knowledge and wisdom of age. Think about how much can be said when the two combine forces! Don’t be afraid to be the age you are. If you do not be your age, the only person you are fooling is yourself. You are also cheating yourself of some very good years in your life, and you probably do not like the person in the mirror to much either.
Pretend you know a martial artist who is quite advanced in their form of martial arts. They teach classes, instructing their students on the proper form, technique, and thought. Our teacher of martial arts continuously promotes specifics about what they teach their students and why. The skills learned are only to be used self defense, or the defense of others. At no time may these skills to be used to bully or to hurt someone one, or to act in haste. What power resides is in these choices!
What we never think about is this martial artist had to both discover, and then choose how to use their gifts. Their actions have no feeling or thought. Their power is what they choose to do. At some point in their life, they had to make a decision that determined the direction for the rest of their life. They knew what their gift was, they just had to choose how to use it.
Most of us do not have the talents of a martial artist. We do however have our own special gifts. Somewhere in our life, herd thinking set in and overtook our thought process! We forgot we are special, and worse we forgot we have our own special gifts.
We must take some time and reflect on our gifts, and what we want from them. We serve no real purpose in this world unless we use our gifts thoughtfully. Acting with knowledge of why we do what we do is our power. If we do not use our gifts thoughtfully we are wasting them. When we waste them we give away our power. When we give away our power we become bitter. When we become bitter we lose our self.
Think and remember what your gifts are. Your gifts are as small or as big as you want them to be. Only you define your limits! Let your gifts and your power show, be proud of what you can do. The universe is waiting for you to rediscover your gifts and start using them!
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A retired person who is a licensed Minister, who is also is a self proclaimed Prophet of God, receives direct albeit sporadic communications from God, was once given a visit to heaven. Afterward, acting on direction from God, they wrote down their experience, and some additional things they were shown or told. It was rewritten a few times, and sent off to one or more publishers for publication. The result to date is poor at best with very few copies sold.