Is Life a series of good and bad news?
The other day I was working outside in the sun in 95° weather. After an hour, I started feeling weak and the sweat was streaming (I sweat a lot). I walked over and sat down in the shade, but did not feel any better. About that time, Jerilyn called me in to eat lunch. Afterward, I still felt weak and washed out. I put away my tools, went inside, took a shower and set down to read the paper. I promptly went to sleep and woke up several hours later. I felt weak the remainder of the day. I guess you can still do dumb things at any age. I think I would have been alright had I been working in the shade.
Do you ever get the feeling that life is a series of bad news with good news interspersed here and there? My prayer list seems to keep growing. Sometimes, I feel so bad when I keep asking God, over and over to help the people I love and care about back to good health. I wonder if He ever gets tired of the same requests. I have tried asking him only once a day and then thanking him for my many blessings in my other prayers. But, the health of those close to me lay heavy on my mind and I get back to praying for the return of their good health constantly. There are 6.7 billion people on earth. Of those, 12% are non-religious and 2.3% are atheist. To me, that means The Lord, or whatever he is called in other lands, could get approximately 6 billion prayers daily. If all these people are like me and repeat themselves, what must He think? Maybe, originality is not required when praying. Maybe, God looks into our hearts and understands. I hope so.
Jerilyn’s stack of newspapers, which dated back to February, has been greatly reduced. She gave up the other day and summarily selected half of the stack for immediate recycling. “I’ll never get to all these papersâ€, she mumbled to herself, as she neatly shoved them into a paper bag. They set comfortably at our curb, waiting for the recycle truck to pick them up. I cannot read a newspaper that is a week old and prefer not to read one that is 3 days old. I have to admit that I get most of my news from the internet. I mostly use our local paper for local news and sports. Newspaper readers are declining about 6% yearly.
They say you can tell a lot about a man by looking at his friends. Mostly, I believe this is true. If you don’t have a lot of friends you may be a quiet person, keeping mostly to yourself and enjoying the company of a few friends and relatives. If you do have a lot of friends, you are probably outgoing and socially engaging. The overriding part of this equation is the quality of your friends. I believe we all prefer to think our friends are good people, or we would not have them as friends. I also believe that we have people thrust into our lives that we would not choose to associate with. We make the best of that situation. I guess the point here is that if we are judged by our friends, are we also judged by those people thrust into our lives? More likely, our lives are filled with people we choose and people not chosen. I remember, as a young boy in high school, my mother telling me “Tommy Joe, you are known by the company you keepâ€. She thought some of the guys I associated with were ruffians. Anyway, the associations stopped and life soon got back to normal. As adults, associations are not so easily dissolved. For a moment there, I thought I had the answer to this dilemma, but, it seems to have slipped away. Until it comes back, I will continue to struggle for a solution.
Las week I sent out an e-mail about George Bush disparaging our military in a press conference. I received a few inquiries from the readers of this weekly missive stating they doubted George Bush said those things. I must admit, in retrospect, it did not sound like him. After some extensive research I have concluded that he did not say those things. I am surprised how easily I accepted that article as truth. When you don’t like someone the door that lets negative things in seems to open wider. When it comes to George, my door must be wide open. I regret sending you that article and promise to be more circumspect in the future.
I hope you’re enjoying your summer, or whatever season it is in your part of the world. Thanks for reading.
Tommy
“If you haven’t forgiven yourself something, how can you forgive others?”
Dolores Huerta
