Category: Observations

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I'm Just Sayin Observations Stories

How Does Your Garden Grow?

When parents have their first child they look at it as a bundle of joy filled with wonder and potential. To them it is perfection, however, they forget that even Charles Manson, Hitler and Bin Laden started out as sweet babies.

We are born as gardens filled with a variety of seeds that spring up and grow throughout our lives. Seeds of doubt mixed in with envy, greed, lust, deceit, cruelty, anger, selfishness spring up weeds that desperately try to choke out the flowers of love, joy, peace, kindness, self-discipline, and faithfulness.

When we are born it is our parents job to landscape our lives like a skilled gardener.  Hours should be spent weeding out the bad and nourishing the good. In a garden that isn’t cared for beauty struggles to survive.

I think in life we often feel that we can just sit back sometimes and coast. We like to keep things low maintenance and instead of getting our hands dirty and digging into the root of the problem, we just clip it back or pay someone else to take care of the problem for us. In my own life I’m working on weeding out some bad habits and planting some good ones. I’m digging deep to unearth some deeply rooted weeds that have threatened to not only choke out the good things in my life, but to destroy me entirely. It has only been by the grace of God that I am the man that I am. If left to my own devices I feel that I not only have the imagination, but also the resources, to successfully destroy everything that I have worked hard for in my life.

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Observations

“Finally, social solidarity is NOT ‘socialism’. Drop the infantilism, conservatives.”

The title of this post is from the husband of a very popular mommy blogger. I love both of these people and this isn’t a “hate” post or anything like that, it is rather a post about how people that are passionate about their ideas often feel that the opposing party is being a baby or whining when they are being passionate about their ideas.

As I’ve gotten older one of the things that I have come to realize about “Hot Button” issues is that they are complicated and both sides normally have very valid points.

Healthcare
Abortion
Religion
Politics
Same-Sex Marriage
Evolution v. Creation

These are just a few topics that come to mind when I think of people being extremely touchy. Why do we feel touchy? Because we feel threatened. When you give one person a certain freedom we may feel, whether it is a realistic fear or not, that we are going to be giving up something that we hold dear.

If I say yes to free healthcare for those in need, what is it going to cost me? If I say that abortion is okay, then where will humans draw the line on playing God? If we say yes to Same-Sex Marriage will that erode traditional family values?  If I say I accept my neighbors religion and that religion happens to believe in human sacrifce where does that leave me?

Some items are more black and white than others. There is a such thing as moral absolutes, most people just don’t want to use the Bible as a guide for moral absolutes. But if you don’t use the Bible, where do you get get your moral compass? Where do you find truth?

In the end we each must have to come to our own conclusions about what is right and wrong in life and we each individually will have to deal with the consequences of our actions and those choices. When interacting with people who don’t have similar beliefs as yours it is important to be respectful. Don’t name call, patronize, condescend or insult. Instead, seek to understand why they believe their believes and be prepared to intelligently back up your own.

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I'm Just Sayin Observations Relationships

Something is Up

The dream sequence started differently. I mean, I was there and then suddenly I was grabbed by this girl that I knew and she started kissing me. It caught me off gaurd and I fell down. She fell with me her tongue locked in my cheek and me wondering if she was going to cut me with her braces. Braces? She doesn’t have braces in reality so why does she have them in this dream sequence?

Her blond hair and milk colored complexion paired with her rich red lips remind me of Gwen Stefani or one of those blond girls in a comic strip.

I should be delighted that some girl is throwing herself at me, but I am perplexed because this person, where did she come from and why all of the sudden is she here? At this skating rink?

It’s not a sex dream, I rarely have those even though in Psychology 101 we were told that most of our dreams were sexual, what? I don’t think so. I dream mostly of food and chocoloate chip cookies and working at the nursing home and Ultimate Frisbee.

The few times I have had sex dreams I always wake up before the sex. Does that happen to you? To everyone? It’s like one of those dreams where you have won the lotto or suddenly your wildest dream is coming true but before it fully comes to fruition you wake up.

But lately, my dreams are different. My day dreams are different too. I’m scanning girls all the time wondering if they could be the future Mrs. because the last futue Mrs. hopeful was not interested in the least and she let me know by ingoring my attempts at starting up a super-delicious romance that would have started with her and I and a plate of Thai and we would be laughing and eating Pad Thai and our lips would touch as we slurped on a really long and fat rice noodle and it would be like a scene from Lady and the Tramp and then later we would have a batch of puppies.

For real though, lately, something is up. I think being self-employed has left me with too much time to be alone and the time that I used to spend alone on the weekends was “ME” time but now that is all I have, “Me” time and too much of that and so yeah, I’d love to have a woman in my life that I could take to breadwinners and to watch Grey’s Anatomy with. I’d sit with her on the couch and massage her feet and listen to her talk endlessly about her day and what she wanted to eat for dinner and how her mom is stressing her out. I’d listen and I’d be grateful that my time was no longer all mine.

So yeah, something is up, perhaps I am finally growing up… it’s doubtful, but maybe.

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Observations

The Other Half is Actually a Third

“You know the problem… I’m going to tell you the problem…” insert sigh here from my new friend who I only partied with once before, “It’s just that all of our friends have kids and we just aren’t there yet, you know?”

I was sort of taken aback at this point. Imagine me in a kitchen, single me who is looking at this gorgeous girl who has the most perfect husband, (seriously, he is almost as cool as wolverine) and she is wiping down a countertop with her petite hand and she is lamenting the fact that her friends are pressuring her to have kids.

I looked in my red glass and wondered if someone had slipped me a mickey or a double shot of rohipnol. For some reason I thought there were only two worlds that humans live in, Single and Married. Yes, I know there is a divorced category but that don’t count because they did, at one time, fall into one of these two categories. However, there is a third category that seems to be almost as cruel as the single category and that is the “Married with Children” category.

Single people aren’t complete at all.

Married people are only partially complete.

Married with Children equals completedness.

I have to admit though, I felt a little bit better knowing that even after your married you still deal with peer pressure on some level. It made me not feel so alone in my singleness, like really, it doesn’t matter what stage you are at in life, you are always going to feel pressure from society to be better or more than what you currently are. I mean give it a rest already, just let people be.

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Observations Stories

So What

What’s it like not being a Christian? What is it like not having any faith? What could possibly motivate you to continue on this planet if you think there is absolutely no purpose for our existence?

Lately I’m all “So What” all the time. I sit on my couch and as much as I know my life is pretty awesome as far as single guys lives I have to wonder – what next? So I get married, have some kids, grandkids, etc and then I die?

I remember when I was younger and at church they would talk about the rapture happening. The Lord’s imminent return was constantly a topic of discussion pretty much my entire childhood. I was fixated on it so much so that there were times I would hope that it wouldn’t happen because next week I was going to get to go to Six Flags or get my driver’s license or perhaps a girl I liked might like me back.

That seems like a lifetime ago and now I sit around praying for God to come already. I feel like sometimes I am going through the perfunctory motions of life – making money, paying bills, eating, sleeping – only to kill time, to have something to do before the end, which is really the beginning.

Last week as I was driving to Waco to do some IT work at the nursing home I couldn’t help but feel like my life is wasted. I’ve felt this for quite some time now and I don’t know how to change it. Perhaps this is where people get when they go into missions or they quit their jobs to do something amazing with their lives – like work at an AIDS hospice.

But even those things would only bring a marginal amount of joy compared to knowing what is in store for me when I leave this planet. I think sometimes it would be better not to know. Like maybe if growing up all I was ever told was that by believing in Christ kept me from going to hell and then right at the last minute – SURPRISE! – you’re going to the most awesome place, a place beyond all human comprehension. But instead I am like that kid who is told 6 months beforehand that he is going to get to go to Disney World and that 6 months seems like an eternity.

Maybe the entire purpose of this life is only to make us really appreciate heaven, these trials, these struggles, this inanity of life, perhaps without it we would just take heaven for granted.

And all of this just takes me back to my original point – if you don’t believe in God then what in the world get’s you out of bed in the morning? What motivates you? What keeps you from saying – So What?