Book List

Several of the blogs I have been following lately have come out with their "favorite books" or "current books" or just "recommended" book lists. I have decided to do the same. The following are some books that are my all-time favorites, and some that I have read recently and are quite good.
*Pride and Prejudice- Jane Austen
*Les Miserables- Victor Hugo
*The Belgariad Series- David Eddings
*These is My Words- Nancy Turner
*Freakonomics- Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner
*The Sword of Shannara- Terry Brooks (and as many of the subsequent books as you like)
*Romeo and Juliet- William Shakespeare (not technically a book, I know)

Children Are An Heritage of The Lord

One of my favorite scriptures comes from the book of Psalms in the Bible. It is Psalm 127:3 and reads : “Lo, children are an heritage of the Lord...” I love this scripture! It reaffirms everything I feel as a mother, and perfectly explains the special feelings a parent has for his/her child.

Today has been an average day. Nothing incredibly remarkable has happened and my baby girl has not done anything amazing. In fact, right now she has just woken up from her nap and is unusually grumpy. But I love her so :) Today and every day I am grateful for every second I have with her. She brings a smile to my heart every moment of every day. I will be forever grateful that I have been blessed to be a mother. People think I am crazy when I say that I want to have a lot of kids, but really, I would rather do nothing else. Even if I have to sacrifice a career and beauty and fashion and prestige and all the other things that the world says make women worthwhile, I do not care. I am a mother :D

Mmmm...Cake

Today is my birthday! So Happy Birthday to me! (and my twin sister, Krysta!) One of my favorite things about birthdays is the cake. In fact I like cake so much that I started following a website called Cake Wrecks, it is hilarious! Click here for the link. Anyway, I decided to just look around the world wide web and see what I could find about birthday cakes and I found this:

“The service of a birthday cake is often preceded by the singing of Happy Birthday to You in English speaking countries, or an equivalent birthday song. In fact, the phrase "Happy Birthday" did not appear on birthday cakes until the song Happy Birthday to You was popularized in the early 1900s.”

There you go! Random birthday trivia and a link to a great site that will keep you laughing for hours! Think of it as my Happy Birthday present to you :)

A Lesson In History

Yeah, I know what you're thinking: BORING!!! As a kid, I really didn't find history very interesting. It was all about a bunch of dead people that wrote and said things in a very stiff language that was hard for me to understand, or follow for very long without my attention wandering. If I remembered any kind of historical event or anything about a historical time period it was for one of two reasons: 1) I saw it in a movie (real accurate I'm sure), or 2) it was about Egyptians or some kind of exotic ancient civilization. American History was absolutely boring to me.

The reason for this is the way History is taught in our schools. With a few exceptions, it is incredibly boring. Children don't learn about how radical the ideas of the founding fathers were. They don't learn that, by signing the Declaration of Independence those men were signing a death warrant for themselves if the King's men ever got their hands on them.

Children don't learn the real reason for the original Boston Tea Party: Taxation Without Representation. I know I heard that phrase when I was younger, but I still thought people poured the tea into the harbor because they didn't want to pay any taxes at all. That is a major issue in perception. It turns the Boston Tea Party from citizens demanding their rights in governance into a bunch of lawless rabble-rousers. Children don't learn any of this because all they are taught are long, boring words from a textbook. They are not given any context, in today's words and perspectives, how the events that have shaped our American history would have been viewed at the time. Because of this, American children aren't really learning history.

Some people might say, “we don't need to know every fact of American History. It is all in the textbooks and online and we can look it up whenever we need to.” To me, this is sad. Attitudes like this are incredibly prevalent among the younger generations of our country and it is causing a real problem: Americans don't know what we are fighting for anymore, so they aren't fighting at all. I don't mean “fighting” like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, though those wars are definitely relevant. I mean fighting a moral battle to keep The United States of America strong and prosperous.

As a result of our poor education in history, the young people of our country have come to take our rights and freedoms for granted, and to not understand that these blessings don't just inherently manifest themselves on all Americans everywhere. Since we don't understand the value of our system of government, we have become increasingly apathetic towards it. We put it in other people's hands with little thought and leave it to them to run things for us.

What happens when we leave it to them to run things for us

We don't know much or care much about politics and how government works, because we were completely turned off by how boring it all was in school.

Americans have had a very successful system of government, so far, because of thought, effort, and care put in by our country's leaders who knew they were accountable to the American people. Now, Americans run a great chance of losing that form of government (and freedom), so carefully and prayerfully thought out and protected since its origination, simply because we can't remember our history. We let corruption run rampant through offices that should be held with respect and decency simply because we did not care to look at all at what was happening. However, there is hope for us yet.

Despite America's love of having a hero to be able to worship and praise, our hope is not one person. Our hope lies in many people. It lies in all the people who are finally waking up from our stupor of years and calling for rightness in our leaders. It does not even matter that there are different ideas of what is right. What matters is that the American people are caring about it, starting to think for themselves what they feel is right, and are demanding that representation in Washington, D.C. Where before there were masses willing to be told by their representatives what is right, now there are masses telling their representatives what is right. Not only are the people saying that, they are also telling their reps that if the people aren't being listened to, the reps will be replaced. Bye-bye nice cushy job in Washington, with lobbyists wooing you, and being able to pass every bit of legislation in your own personal favor.

Perhaps my perspective is a little bit different from yours. Perhaps you don't see any of the changes that I do. That would not be surprising, really, because I am a college student. I go to school with the same people day-in and day-out, and we all think pretty similarly because, well, we are all being educated at the same place. But a few internet searches will tell you that I am really not far off-base. There are people now who are taking the time to learn the important lessons of history that we failed to learn, for one reason or another, in public schools. If you are like me, you may feel like there has been A LOT going wrong with the United States of America and its government lately. However, my years spent in higher education have been invaluable to me for more than my (eventual) degree. They have taught me that there is a change in the wind. Hollywood may be trying to convince us all that we have no morals left, and Washington may be the prime example for their argument, but I don't believe that is true. Many of the people I go to school with and many of the people I am taught by don't believe it either. I believe that the “average Joe or Jane” American has a value system and lives by it. Clearly they are not all the same, but that is not what matters. What matters is that we, the people, have not forsaken our morals, and we demand that our government does not either. We know that there is a difference between right and wrong, now we just have to educate ourselves about what that difference is. We need to re-learn our history lessons so we can be familiar with what our country means to us and what must be done to keep it healthy, prosperous, and free.

Stones and Bread: How to be Humbled

Today in my entrepreneurship class we had a guest lecturer. His name was Jeff Peterson. Jeff was there to teach us about using the web in business and the business side of his presentation was very good. I learned some very useful things from him that I am excited about trying to implement. However, there was one part of his lecture that really caught my attention for a different reason.

Jeff started out his lecture by telling the class about the time that Jesus Christ spent fasting in the wilderness, and how Satan came up to Him and tempted Him to turn stones into bread because He could and He was hungry. His point in this story was to illustrate how there are countless people on the internet trying to get others to pay for, in essence, nothing; that these people are turning stones into bread and that Jeff didn't believe in that. He said that he felt that God had guided him into his line of work and that everything he did in business was a deeply spiritual matter.

This so impressed me! Being a religious person I am very used to people who are of my same religion saying things like this. I am very used to talking with people of my religion about spiritual matters and trusting God in our lives. I am so not used to hearing people who are not of my religion speak of these things. I don't know why, but I'm not. Because of this, I feel that it is very easy to, as a member of any religion, fall into an attitude of “it's us against the world” and feel that only other members of your religion are doing things in life that are worthwhile, from a religious perspective. This is especially true if you are a member of a religion or belief that does things differently, or completely opposite, from what everybody else seems to do.

My lesson that I learned today is this: There are wonderful people in this world! It really is a very heartening and uplifting thing to learn. Of course, I “knew” this principle already, but I have never experienced it in this way. I am grateful for Jeff Peterson's testimony of God in his life, because it is true. God is a part of everyone's life, whether they admit it or not. It doesn't matter that we are members of different religions. We are both good people. So here is my challenge; it goes along with my lesson: to look at all the people I know who believe differently than me and start listing the qualities that make them good people, instead of feeling unsure or uneasy about things they do or say simply because we are different. I challenge anyone who reads this to do it too.

Wake-up Call

It is amazing how you can be going along through life thinking that you are doing great, and then wake up one day and realize that you're not. You realize that you aren't completely living up to and fulfilling the standards that you believe in and espouse. You realize that there are so many little things you have stopped doing; that they have added up; that they are going to cause big problems if you don't change soon. You realize that, despite good intentions, you have let yourself slip.

A wake-up call like this can really be demoralizing. It is hard to admit that we are not perfect and that sometimes we have been living an example of “do as I say, not as I do”. But I am grateful for the wake-up call I recently had. I am glad that I realized what was going on and why I was starting to become a lot more unhappy with many things in my life. I am grateful for the opportunity I now have to focus and re-commit to the things I hold dear. The downs I experience are necessary if I truly want to be able to appreciate the ups in life. I hope to have enough humility to be able to stop and consider myself and my actions, instead of going through life being unable to admit wrongs because of fear. So here I go again, feeling like I have to re-start on goals I committed to a long time ago, but excited for the positive effects that the changes I make will bring!

Women of God

“Women of God can never be like women of the world. The world has enough women who are tough; we need women who are tender. There are enough women who are coarse; we need women who are kind. There are enough women who are rude; we need women who are refined. We have enough women of fame and fortune; we need more women of faith. We have enough greed; we need more goodness. We have enough vanity; we need more virtue. We have enough popularity; we need more purity.” --Margaret Nadauld.

How I love this quote! Truly, I love the entire talk it was given in, but this quote really sums it up. This is what I aspire to be in my lifetime. I still have so far to go, but that's ok. I'm trying and I hope I am improving. I also hope that by my self-improvement I can also improve my loved-ones' lives and thoughts and attitudes. There are many things I want to do and be in life, but above all else I hope I am remembered like this.

Renn Zaphiropoulos

In my entrepreneurship class today we had the pleasure of being taught by Mr. Renn Zaphiropoulos. Today was the second of five classes we will have with him. Today he was talking mostly about priorities and expectations, but there were two things in particular that he said that really struck me.

The first relates some to my first blog post. It is about judging. He said “Never judge a person by the group they come from; you may be criminal, you may be hurtful. You can set a profile for a person according to the group they come from, but chances are you will be wrong. Open your heart.” I love messages like this. They illustrate that two very different people, Mr. Zaphiropoulos and myself, can have coinciding views. We don't have to be contrary to one another because of our differences, we can be comfortable with each other because of our compassion.

Next, he was talking about apologies. At first I was incredibly turned off by what his view seemed to be about apologizing. To me, I thought he was saying that apologies are useless and worthless and not worth saying. He said that apologies do nothing to help the situation of the victim. For reference he pointed out a situation where a politician has been cheating, so he gets on tv to apologize. Mr. Zaphiropoulos asked how this helps the position of that politician's wife at all. Naturally, I thought this was a little off. I felt that apologies are a very big and necessary part of life. So I questioned him about it. I asked him that shouldn't those sentiments be expressed anyway? He went on to explain more and I came to understand what he meant. He didn't mean that apologies are terrible. He meant that the way people use apologies and the rewards they expect to get from them are terrible. People think that if they just apologize then the sin should be completely absolved and they can be fully forgiven and entrusted again.

This is wrong, I think. Apologies definitely need to be expressed, but they must also be accompanied by actions of reparation and remedy. Most wrongs are impossible to completely undo, but we must try our best to mitigate the damages we have caused and make things as right as they can be after our mistakes. To simply say some words and then forget about and stop caring for our “victims” (using that word sounds really creepy to me for some reason) is not real apologizing and likely will not engender forgiveness from the Lord. I suppose I cannot speak for Him, but that just seems natural to me.

Mr. Zaphiropoulos' lecture today inspired me to be better in my apologies. I know I will make mistakes and cause hurt, even though I try my hardest not to. So when I do, I want to be better at fully apologizing AND making reparations as best I can. I want to show those I love and those around me that I care.

Les Miserables

I am currently reading Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, the unabridged version. It is not for the faint of heart! 1463 pages long, whew! It is incredibly long and I am loving it. I grew up loving the play that is based on this book, I loved the music before I even understood what it was really about. I loved the love story when I was young, but as I have grown older I have found myself pondering the other characters in the book that I didn't have much of a care about before. Jean Valjean, the former convict turned honest and charitable. Why would he do that, then take on some woman's kid and raise it as his own? Fantine, a poor woman with a baby girl. Until I had my baby I could not comprehend the love this woman had for her child. How did she come to leave her child in the care of terrible people? The play tells you of these stories a little, but it doesn't show you the why's and the how's. I started pondering this fictional story a lot, so I decided to read it. What an adventure it has been! I have loved finding out the whole story behind the story, even if the characters are completely fictional. The emotions portrayed speak right to my heart. I happily anticipate my reading time every day.

One of the other things I love about this book is that Victor Hugo wrote what he wanted. He was not afraid to openly express and publish his views on politics and religion, and he winds them into his characters and his scenes. He was a very faithful man who included religion in his book. Indeed, the first 70 or so pages are all about a bishop in the catholic church. These days it seems like there is always somebody willing to scream at you for expressing any kind of religious view at all, so I have rarely ever ventured such views aloud, even to close friends who are of the same religion as me. I felt like it would be rude to talk about our faith and beliefs, since there was a chance that maybe we would not completely agree on every little point in life. Victor Hugo has inspired me to be different. I don't feel like I need to proselytize and preach to everyone about my faith, but I am not afraid to be open about it in my conversations and life. I will quite happily talk about it and give my views based on it, and I will stand up for what I know is correct.

To Start:

There are so many places to get information in today's world. With the instantaneous dissemination of everything that is happening in the world, judgments of those happenings have become ever faster and more vociferous, making many of the information sites that are available very hard and negative. It seems like every person has some kind of criticism about every event, and if you, the reader or listener or watcher, don't agree then you are worthless and utterly wrong. Many of these voices are quite liberal; I am quite conservative. So I am here to make a place for conservative thought. I do not mean the kind of conservative thought that comes from the likes of Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly. To me those people are not conservative, they are hateful. I am talking about the kind of conservative thought that is centered around faith, charity, and kindness. I don't think it matters what religion a person is or what political thoughts they espouse. I think what matters is that people act faithfully according to their beliefs and that they uphold and keep values that matter.

Inevitably, we all make judgments of others and I'm sure I will make a fair amount of judgments in my writings.

Judging on some level is just plain necessary to get through life. We have to learn how to judge what is right from wrong, and we have to learn how to judge safety from danger. So judging is not bad; usually the ideas on which people base their judgments are wrong. The biggest criteria for making a judgment is “that person thinks differently than me; they are wrong and stupid”. Conservatives and liberals alike do this. This is what our society trains us to do from a very young age. We are taught to scorn anything that is different, or even dissimilar. I think we really need to start doing less judging and having more compassion; when we do judge ideas it should be based on their actual merit instead of just following what some article on the internet told us to believe. This is a change I have been trying very hard to make in my life. I am definitely not perfect about it, but I am trying. I have found that I just have no room in my life for the negativity that comes from such blind judging. I also don't want to inadvertently pass such attitudes along to my children. I want to teach them to do what is right, to have faith, to be compassionate and charitable. I do not want to teach them to be judgmental. So this blog is devoted to positive thought. Since it is my blog, it will invariably be full of my thoughts on subjects of my choosing, and it will be full of my judgments. I hope they are fair, and I hope this can be inspiring to other people besides myself.