Topic: Who Has More Power To Change Our Country? (Read 640 times)

20PMBot · « **on:** September 14, 2008, 07:08:01 pm »

The other night, my Pastor and I were having a discussion about Barack Obama.Â You see, while I have been a Christian only a few years, my democratic ideals have been a part of me for quite a bit longer and, while I respect my Pastor, I just do not agree with him right now.Â Finally, to put an end to this "heated fellowship", my husband informed us both that the President really has so little power that, if either candidate won it would not be the end of the world.

That statement has caused me to come up withÂ a questionÂ I believe to be much more important than who will sit in the Oval Office in January.Â It is blatantly obvious that our country has problems...BIG problems, including, but not limited to, war, terrorism, economic hard times, a health insurance crisis, and the continuing decline of our basic moral fiber.Â And, as I pondered my husband's bit of wisdom, I began to ask myself the real question - Who does have the power to solve our problems and put our nation back on track?Â And the shocking answers are...ME!Â and YOU!Â and US!

I know it seems like an enormous responsibility, but I truly believe that we all hold a piece of the power to set things right.Â We cannot afford as a society to continue to look to Washington to make things better for our families, our schools and our communities.Â The solutions to these problems comes not from the top down, but from the bottom up.Â So, where do we start?

I think our first priority is to change the way we view ourselves in relation to one another.Â An author that has changed the way my 19 year old daughter sees the world, Shane Claiborn says that "each of us is created for community, and in the image of community. And yet everything in the world tries to rob us of this Divine gift."

The world constantly tells us that weÂ have to look out for number one.Â That we have to keep others down to maintain our position.Â We have become a world of self-centered and unempathetic creatures that leave no room for other people's beliefs, opinions, shortcomings,Â needs and suffering.Â We speed through life and step over fallen people instead of taking the time to stop and help them up.Â More and more, we prefer to give them a little kick as we pass.Â It is not enough to just walk by and ignore them.Â We take satisfaction in people's problems and failures, because we are a society that compares, and as long as their life is worse than ours, we feel okay.Â But, we are NOT okay!

I am a Christian, butÂ I abhor religion and believe that it has done far more damage than good to our world.Â I also respect that other people do not share my beliefs, but the following excerpt from Shane Claiborn's book "The Irrisistible Revolution" provides a profound insight into the kind of shift in our daily attitudes that could truly change the world we live in.

"If you ask most people what Christians believe, they can tell you, â€œChristians believe that Jesus is Godâ€™s Son and that Jesus rose from the dead.â€ But if you ask the average person how Christians live, they are struck silent. We have not shown the world another way of doing life. Christians pretty much live like everybody else; they just sprinkle a little Jesus in along the way. And doctrine is not very attractive, even if itâ€™s true. Few people are interested in a religion that has nothing to say to the world and offers them only life after death, when what people are really wondering is whether there is life before death.

As my teacher Tony Campolo used to ask, â€œEven if there were no heaven and there were no hell, would you still follow Jesus? Would you follow him for the life, joy, and fulfillment he gives you right now?â€ I am more and more convinced each day that I would. Donâ€™t get me wrong. Iâ€™m excited about the afterlife. We are going to party like thereâ€™s no tomorrow (umm, and there wonâ€™t be). And yet I am convinced that Jesus came not just to prepare us to die but to teach us how to live. Otherwise, much of Jesusâ€™ wisdom would prove quite unnecessary for the afterlife. After all, how hard could it be to love our enemies in heaven? And the kingdom that Jesus speaks so much about is not just something we hope for after we die but is something we are to incarnate now. Jesus says the kingdom is "within us," "among us," "at hand," and we are to pray that it comes "on earth as it is in heaven." No wonder the early Christian church was known as the Way. It was a way of life that stood in glaring contrast to the world. What gave the early Christians integrity was the fact that they could denounce the empire and in the same breath say, "And we have another way of living. If you are tired of what the empire has to offer, we invite you into the Way." Even the pagan emperors could not ignore the little revolution of love. Emperor Julian confessed, "The godless Galileans feed our poor in addition to their own." And the Way had little cells multiplying all over that ole empire. Of course, everyone was forewarned that in this kingdom everything is backward and upside-down â€” the last are first and the first are last, the poor are blessed and the mighty are cast from their thrones. And yet people were attracted to it. They were ready for something different from what the empire had to offer.

Coming out of college, my friends and I were pretty unwilling to "conform to the pattern of this world," as the Scriptures say (Rom. 12:2). We knew all too well that there is a broad way that leads to death and that most people would take it, but we also knew that there is a narrow way that leads to life, and we wanted to find it (Matt. 7:13 â€“ 14). In fact, people had begun to notice the ripples from our little student movement. I was asked to speak at Easternâ€™s graduation ceremony, and to the chagrin of the dean, I told the story of how some friends and I were busted for rappelling out of the windows of one of the dorms. The dean had written us a warning that said, "Can you please enter and exit the buildings through the doors, like everybody else?" So my graduation message, "Crawl through the Window," went something like this: The doors of normalcy and conformity are dead. The time has come to give up on the doors and find a window to climb through. Itâ€™s a little more dangerous and may get you into some trouble, but it is a heck of a lot more fun. And the people who have changed the world have always been the risk-takers who climb through windows while the rest of the world just walks in and out of doors. It got quite an ovation from everyone but the dean. We were ready for something new."

I am ready for something new.Â I believe it is time to stop looking to the government to take care of people and for people to start taking care of one another.Â We are a busy society, but we all have a moment or two in every day to make a small difference to someone.Â And the truth is that if we take the time to make life better for a few, they will take the time to make life better for a few and our efforts will multiply.Â Pay It Forward was a movieÂ based onÂ fiction, but it was based on more truth and could be more effective than the efforts of every well meaning politician in the world.Â The question I pose to each of you is "What are you going to do to change the world today?" It has nothing to do with how you vote.

Author: Diana Patton
Originally Posted to the Blog At: 2008-09-14 18:47:56
View This Story on the Blog: http://www.twentypeacefulminutes.com/blog/?p=375

momofthree · « **Reply #1 on:** September 15, 2008, 06:34:14 am »

I just woke up and went in to tell my daughter it is time to get up. I came and sat down to check email briefly before going in and repeating my wake up call another 15 times...lol...when I ran across this...

What a great thing to read this morning. Beautifully written. We are ready for change...and as a strong Christian, as much as I stand by my faith, I feel one of our candidates may be able to change things more than the other. It's good to see that we are not blinded by the true needs of our world. Change. We do kick each other while we're down, and we do need to start taking better care of each other...I have always been a republican, but I can even see that our country needs a change that is greater than who sits in the oval office. And as this writer so eloquently wrote...it does begin with us. What a beautiful thought to start the day...every day.

Will · « **Reply #2 on:** September 15, 2008, 07:56:18 am »

Quote from: momofthree on September 15, 2008, 06:34:14 am

I have always been a republican, I cannot even vote for Obama if I wanted to, but right about now I think I would if I could.

Why can't you? There is nothing requiring you to vote Republican simply because you have in the past.

dkpatton · « **Reply #3 on:** September 15, 2008, 08:10:05 am »

I ran across this quote and wish I had seen it before my post.

?The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them,

but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity.?

George Bernard Shaw

momofthree · « **Reply #4 on:** September 17, 2008, 07:28:55 am »

Quote from: Will on September 15, 2008, 07:56:18 am

Quote from: momofthree on September 15, 2008, 06:34:14 am
I have always been a republican, I cannot even vote for Obama if I wanted to, but right about now I think I would if I could.

Why can't you? There is nothing requiring you to vote Republican simply because you have in the past.

Because I have am registered to the republican party, I have always only had members of the republican party on my ballet. Does that apply to the vote in November? I am certainly changing to independent so I can choose either party if I want to next election.

UPDATE: I can!!

Heather · « **Reply #5 on:** September 17, 2008, 10:35:23 am »

you can vote whatever you want in nov. you don't have to vote your party lines

dkpatton · « **Reply #6 on:** September 17, 2008, 10:38:09 am »

Wow guys. The way you vote was so the opposite of the point.

dkpatton · « **Reply #7 on:** October 28, 2008, 09:35:57 am »

This is such a great example of what I was trying to say in this post. Obviously, everyone can't go out and buy someone a house, but if everyone just did what they could....

(CNN) -- Tracy Orr sat in the back of the room and prepared to watch her foreclosed home go up for auction this past Saturday. That's when a pesky stranger sat down beside her and struck up a conversation.

Tracy Orr faced losing her home to foreclosure when Marilyn Mock, a stranger, stepped in to buy it.

"Are you here to buy a house?" Marilyn Mock said.

Orr couldn't hold it in. The tears flowed. She pointed to the auction brochure at a home that didn't have a picture. "That's my house," she said.

Within moments, the four-bedroom, two-bath home in Pottsboro, Texas, went up for sale. People up front began casting their bids. The home that Orr purchased in September 2004 was slipping away.

She stood and moved toward the crowd. Behind her, Mock got into the action.

"She didn't know I was doing it," Mock says. "I just kept asking her if [her home] was worth it, and she just kept crying. She probably thought I was crazy, 'Why does this woman keep asking me that?' "

Mock says she bought the home for about $30,000. That's when Mock did what most bidders at a foreclosure auction never do. Watch why a woman would buy back a stranger's home ?

"She said, 'I did this for you. I'm doing this for you,' " Orr says. "When it was all done, I was just in shock."

"I thought maybe her and her husband do these types of things to buy them and turn them. She said, 'No, you just look like you needed a friend.' "

"All this happened within like 5 minutes. She never even asked me my name. She didn't ask me my financial situation. She had no idea what [the house] looked like. She just did it out of the graciousness of her heart, just a 'Good Samaritan,' " Orr says. "It's amazing."

Orr says she had taken out a mortgage of $80,000 in 2004 when she first bought the home. At the time, she says she worked for the U.S. Postal Service. But she lost her job a month after taking out the loan when she says the Post Office fired her over a DWI while off-duty. She says a wrongful termination lawsuit is pending.

Without a job, she fell behind on her home payments. She sold some property in 2006 for $12,000 and paid it to the mortgage company, thinking she had done enough to save herself from foreclosure -- but to no avail, she says.

"It's just been a bad deal," says Orr, who now works at All Saints Camp and Conference Center, a Christian group with ties to the Episcopal Diocese of Dallas, Texas.

With the foreclosure auction approaching, she planned to make the nearly 80-mile drive to Dallas this past Saturday with an investor friend. But she says he ditched her at the last-minute. She went to the auction with her family, and suddenly found herself in the back with Mock.

"I always talk to everyone around me," Mock says. "I mean you can always find out all kinds of interesting things when you talk to people around you. So I just asked her, 'Are you here to buy a house?' "

Mock, who is known as the "Rock Lady" for her small business selling flagstone and other rocks in Rockwall, Texas, says she went to the auction with her 27-year-old son to help him buy his first home. He bought his home, and soon afterward Mock came across Orr.

Mock says she's using one of her business dump trucks as collateral for the $30,000 sale price. "I can't afford to just give [the house] to her," she says.

As for Orr's payments, Mock says, "We'll just figure out however much she can pay on it. That way, she can have her house back."

Why be so generous?

"She was just so sad. You put yourself in their situation and you realize you just got to do something," says Mock, who says she has trouble walking by homeless people on the street and not helping them out.

"If it was you, you'd want somebody to stop and help you."

When she told her husband of 30 years that she'd just bought a home for a stranger, she says his reaction was: "Whatever."

"He's used to it," she says with a booming laugh.

Mock says she's excited for another reason too. Orr's house is located near a Texas fishing hot-spot. "She says I can come up there and fish, and I love to fish!"

Orr, who nearly lost her home, says her newfound friend has "given me back faith and hope to keep going and hold my head up."

"Things happen for a reason," Orr says.

Twenty Peaceful Minutes

Author Topic: Who Has More Power To Change Our Country? (Read 640 times)

20PMBot

Who Has More Power To Change Our Country?

momofthree

Re: Who Has More Power To Change Our Country?

Will

Re: Who Has More Power To Change Our Country?

dkpatton

Re: Who Has More Power To Change Our Country?

momofthree

Re: Who Has More Power To Change Our Country?

Heather

Re: Who Has More Power To Change Our Country?

dkpatton

Re: Who Has More Power To Change Our Country?

dkpatton

Re: Who Has More Power To Change Our Country?