Family

The family is a haven in a heartless world. ~Attributed to Christopher Lasch

I used to think that family was just people who annoy you that you are related to by blood, however over the past year, I have discovered that family can be a lot more than that. I also realized that family can be many different people than that. I have a few friends that seem more like family to me at times than my real family does. In many different situations your family and friends that are like family can be your best support system. They may not always agree with what you do, or the decisions you make, but they are the people you can always count on to be there for you. One nice thing in my family is that no matter how much you mess up they will always take you back, friends will always come and go in my life, but my family will ALWAYS be there for me.

Little Miracles

In life I see miracles around me every day, but one thing that always amazes me is the birth of a baby. The baby in the picture to the left is four day old Angel Jesus (an-HEL HAY-soos). He is the most recent foster baby to come into my family's home. We received him on Monday March 3rd. When I look at this tiny, 5 pound 10 ounce, little boy, I am just amazed at how God can so perfectly create life. Every child that God creates is perfect as they are, no matter if they are mentally of physically disabled, somehow disfigured, or normal. He creates each person for a reason, and still people take life for granted. It is strange to me that people like Angel's mother who are on crack can carry a baby full term and have a perfectly healthy child, yet there are others who do everything right and still their child is born premature, or horribly ill, or disabled. Like I said, I believe each life is created for a reason, and we will never fully understand, but it is just a mystery to me. The baby in the picture to the right is Emma. She is sister's friends baby who was born four months premature. She was born in December and is still in the hospital. Even though she has had all of the problems she has had, She has still been an amazing blessing to her parents and everyone around her.

I know this has been a lot of rambling, but the point I am trying to make is that God is amazing, and does amazing things every day that we all take for granted way more than we should.

Change

"We must be the change we wish to see in the world." - Gandhi

Change. We all want it to happen, but we are all afraid of it. Almost everyone in college, including myself, can't wait to be done, yet I know we are all so scared of the "real world." Some of us may have no idea what we want to do once we graduate, others may have everything planned out, and yet we all have that small amount of fear in us. What we have to be able to do is bury that small voice telling us to hold back and be afraid, and we must change the world around us to be what we want it to be. We can all do it in small ways every day, every hour, every minute, but there will be the few of us who are able to do something great. I know that I hope that by the time I die I will have changed at least one person's life in a significant way, and I hope that everyone has that same goal. I want to put forth a challenge today to anyone who reads this; think about your life and how you hope to change the world, think of a small thing you can do on a daily basis to change the world around you, now do that small thing every day.