One little passage really struck me: "It seems to me that every experience I have ever had, everything I have ever thought or said or done, and every person I have ever loved, has contributed in some essential way to the human being I am to-day. Had one stroke of the brush touche the canvas in an altered manner, or splashed upon it a darker or lighter colour, I should be a very different person now."
Today at work, I was grunting and complaining about how I often get bored, upset, tired of answering phones every day. I was thinking about how the people who come to community mental health are never happy and I just want to deal with happy people. People who aren't constantly in crisis, people who aren't constantly depressed, people who are just stable, successful, happy.
I cringe at the thought of thinking about that because these are the people who need the most love, and because they haven't found it in their life previously they have turned to get help.
I became grateful for the person that I am. The fact that I am able to deal with people like that, the fact that I was raised in a decent manner with loving parents, the fact that I'm not living off of food stamps. I'm so grateful for the things that a lot of those people never had. So, I'm seeing why people are the way they are, and why I am the way I am. I'm learning that now more than ever that differences are good, and if we were all the same like in the book "The Giver" we would all be plain ole bored.
Then I was watching Numbers today, while I was unpacking and cleaning and Charlie, the mathmatician, said, "Capitalisits are always so surprised when capitalism works!" and I thought about it more and figured that when your brought up in a culture that is so money/material hungry then it's hard to see why anyone would want a capitalist culture. For poor countries whose currency is so messed up, when they are invested in and their countries economy is supplemented, it really does work. However one sad thing about capitalism is that there will always be poor people and there will always be rich people, never one equal class.
When writing and thinking about that I'm reminded of a conversation I had with a friend while I was staying in Maine. We were brainstorming about ideas of serving a missional purpose. We thought about how Christians are always eager to help the poor, because that's what Jesus did. Jesus healed and blessed the helpless on so many occasions. My friend in Maine threw out this idea about how Jesus didn't walk the earth in today's world so we must adjust our missional focus so that if he were to walk the earth today, that we would be doing what he would be doing. So some how we got on this idea how a large precentage of the world's wealth is owned by a small small group of people. We talked about how Christians find it hard to reach out to the extremely rich because they seem to have all the earthly things they could ever need, unlike the poor, they are not physically needy only spiritually needy. We thought about a missional group that focused on rich communities, how would the share the love of God with a group of people that believe they don't need to be blessed because they are successful on their own. I wonder if Jesus likes capitalism. I wonder this because it makes a class distinction. I would like to think he does, because I don't think our country could have made it this far, had He not. I think God puts us all in a place in the world so that His servants can bless us in certain ways so that He can be revealed and worshipped in the process. Had we been a different person in a different place, the action would not have affected us the same way.
I went to New Jersey last weekend and this is one of the things I saw.
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