Rules, rules, and rules for rules. Oh yes, did I mention rules?

     I've gone to this private Christian school for quite a while (6 years now) and this blog that I happened to stumble upon has brought something to my attention. Throughout my career as a student I've been expected to behave a certain way because I'm supposed to have prestige for attending a high-end school. Although I understand that this isn't outrageous request, it has turned out to affect who I am as a person.

     Since I've been raised by "follow the rules and you'll be good" I've come to depend on the rules as the safe road to success in both worldly and religious aspects. As I've grown and matured over the years the more I've realized that to live my life by these rules and to depend upon them isn't really going to help me develop. I have become accustomed to taking the safe route by following rules as close as I can and because of that I think/have thought that following them is the only good path to take. That people who didn't apply these rules to their very core were wrong. Point being, since I had taken this principle to heart I always figured that if I followed Christianity's rules that I would in a way "win" God's love.

     At one point I sort of gave up, I didn't and still don't feel as if I have acquired (or found) His love. That blog I mentioned talked about how this girl had a similar problem. She stuck to the rules and now she wants to go out and experience His everlasting love for herself, not through the rules. To be honest, I've kind of been inspired by this. That blog kind of flipped a switch in my brain that I hadn't known was there before. As if it shed light on something I hadn't ever thought about.

     "It's no wonder that my friend struggles with the idea that she needs to "clean her life up" in order to come to God. She loves God with all of her heart. But she's been told for years--explicitly or implicitly--that love is earned when you follow the rules. And part of her wonders whether that's true with Him as well."

     This part of that blog is what touched me the most... It relates to me almost on a parallel level, which is why I think I connected with it so much. So thank you to Matt Rose for posting that on your blog. I feel as I might have the solution to why I've been having trouble with my spiritual relationship between the Lord and myself. For whoever is reading this, what have your spiritual problems been in the past? Did you ever find a solution? Can you relate to situations such as mine? I'm interested in what you might respond.

Credit to Matt for that post on his blog.

The Practice of Optimism

     So for school I have to type a paper over Helen Keller's essay, The Practice of Optimism and it actually brought to my attention some interesting comments on the people that inhabit out world. Now, obviously, due to the title, Helen is going to side with optimism over pessimism, however I don't necessarily agree with her.

     She constantly seems to exaggerate in her comparisons between the two trains of thought ending with optimism improving the world and pessimism "retarding" it. To me this doesn't seem either reasonable or logical. For her opinion to actually work peoples' minds would have to be one hundred percent of either or, which by the way isn't possible. Helen constantly reiterates the same points over and over throughout her essay and just rephrases it with different people. She does have some good points, I just don't think it should be taken as fact, and far from it. The paper is obviously he opinion, but she does have some good points.

     I personally believe that everyone has a combination of both pessimistic and optimistic qualities. As for myself, I'm more of a pessimist, but only with thoughts concerning myself. What about you all? Are you a pessimist? Optimist? What's your opinion between the two?

Am I just another blog?

     So I've looked around the website for a little bit, going from blog to blog, and it made me realize this, "I'm just another blog no one cares about..."
Now, for those of you that are reading this later, when I'm writing this I have absolutely no followers. Weird, huh? Why in the world would I be typing this if I have no followers? Well I'll tell you, rhetorical question that I'm going to answer myself. I'm making this to get my thoughts out, to myself, so that I can process the info better and also in the hopes you'll find some sort of enjoyment out of this. Whether it be from humor of my weird post or because you actually like reading about my thoughts... However it's most likely the first option...

     Back to the point. Being a new blogger you're not going to stick out, but this kind of made me think about me as a person. Am I "just" another person out of billions? Do I really mean anything? Am I of any value? My answer to myself is yes, even though it might not be or seem like much, I matter somewhere to something or someone. It's because of that reason that I will start and continue this blog, it would be nice to have SOME followers though. :)