A true friend knows your weakness but shows you your strengths; feels your fears but fortifies your faith; sees your anxieties but frees your spirit; recognizes your disabilities but emphasizes your possibilities.
Love comes when manipulation stops; when you think more about the other person than about his or her reactions to you. When you dare to reveal yourself fully. When you dare to be vulnerable.
~Dr. Joyce Brothers
Love isn’t perfect. It isn’t a fairytale or a storybook and it doesn’t always come easy. Love is overcoming obstacles, facing challenges, fighting to be together, holding on and never letting go. It is a short word, easy to spell, difficult to define, and impossible to live without. Love is work, but most of all, love is realizing that every hour, every minute, every second of it was worth it because you did it together. [Author unknown]
A man was exploring caves by the Seashore. In one of the caves he found a canvas bag with a bunch of hardened clay balls. It was like someone had rolled clay balls and left them out in the sun to bake. They didn’t look like much, but they intrigued the man, so he took the bag out of the cave with him. As he strolled along the beach, he would throw the clay balls one at a time out into the ocean as far as he could.
He thought little about it, until he dropped one of the clay balls and it cracked open on a rock . Inside was a beautiful, precious stone!
Excited, the man started breaking open the remaining clay balls. Each contained a similar treasure. He found thousands of dollars worth of jewels in the 20 or so clay balls he had left.
Then it struck him. He had been on the beach a long time. He had thrown maybe 50 or 60 of the clay balls with their hidden treasure into the ocean waves. Instead of thousands of dollars in treasure, he could have taken home tens of thousands, but he had just thrown it away!
It’s like that with people. We look at someone, maybe even ourselves, and we see the external clay vessel. It doesn’t look like much from the outside. It isn’t always beautiful or sparkling, so we discount it.
We see that person as less important than someone more beautiful or stylish or well known or wealthy. But we have not taken the time to find the treasure hidden inside that person.
There is a treasure in each and every one of us. If we take the time to get to know that person, and if we ask God to show us that person the way He sees them, then the clay begins to peel away and the brilliant gem begins to shine forth.
May we not come to the end of our lives and find out that we have thrown away a fortune in friendships because the gems were hidden in bits of clay. May we see the people in our world as God sees them.
I am so blessed by the gems of friendship I have with you. Thank you for looking beyond my clay vessel.
Point to ponder: Appreciate every single thing you have, especially your friends. Life is too short and friends are too few!
‘Do not ask the Lord to Guide your Footsteps if you are not willing to MOVE your Feet’
They’re born everyday! They walk among us and they seek who the can destroy. They spiritually feed off misery and the ignorance of others becomes their playground.
Some believe such people come from homes where there is no love and or where hate is taught. But that is not true! Mean-spirited people come from all walks of life. They are born to every race and every gender; and prejudice of any kind makes it harder to discover such people. For example, I learned in the circle I once traveled that all whites were bad, most if not all white men molested children, white people smell, white people have no color, white people are from the devil, and finally “all white people are rich”. And even though I know better now by understanding people are people, there are still people (white, black, blue, purple and brown) that buy into racial nonsense. And that’s the reason I’m blogging about mean people coming from all walks of life. And had it not been for my encounter this past weekend, as a black woman, with a mean-spirited white man I know I would have not come up with such a blog post; because, like I stated, had I not known about the evils of humanity or understood mean-spirited people I could see where the confrontation could have gotten out of control.
The Simple Truth Is
We are all fearfully and wonderfully made. We all have the ability to be bad. We all can become sexually deviant. We all have the capability to smell when we forego bathing. We all have skin pigmentation. We all have the ability to do the devil’s bidding. And not all white people are rich! People are people despite race, creed, religion, gender, and sexual orientation. What make us different spiritually when it comes to our existence are choices. Really, it’s just that simple.
Choices
People chose to be cruel. And sadly they use race, gender, sexual preferences, religion, politics and such to carry out their unkind deeds. They’ve rehearsed role-playing so much in their small minds that they seek the perfect conditions to be spirit exterminators. It’s never hard to figure out their agenda after cavy encounters. They’re usually standing/sitting with smirks of satisfactions on their faces. They are usually braggers that are empty vessels. And they try to fill their emptiness by insulting people publicly or privately as they exercise the power of choice.
Lesson Learned
Never stoop to their level. Recognize mean-spirited people for who they are [empty vessels] and remove yourself from their presence [period].
As I sat in silence watching the below video of a mother discussing how she put a pillow over her dying son’s face, I wonder about her choice. Upon later reflection, I asked myself could I aid or not aid one of my children in suicide. Especially, since, at this point I’m not face with such a difficult situation. And even if I tried to put myself in such an awful place I will always have the same answer.
One would think my strong faith in God and my belief “thou shalt not kill” take precedence over a person’s dying wish such as taking a life. But I honestly believe I’m wired to respect life. And God’s instructions just solidifies what I believe naturally. But, I do, with a humanitarian frame of mind understand why this mother helped her son do the task of suicide.
Please understand, I’m certainly not in a position to say she was wrong. She was a mother. She was faced with a dilemma. And she acted in thoughts of kindness by ending the suffrage of her son [period].
Mean Spirited People
Until today I have never heard of dignity dying.
Black Women Have It Going On 