Random Thoughts

Have you ever met someone and after being around them realize that they are a totally different person then you thought they were? It’s funny how that works. People these days think they have to hide the “real them” so deep down because they don’t think it’s good enough that it takes a long time to get to know them.
Sometimes you are friends with people long enough that you don’t realize what they are doing to you. The “real them” finally surfaces and you don’t realize it until it’s too late. By then you are in too deep and can’t get out of the relationship without getting hurt even more or hurting them.
Other times you get to know people at a certain place then meet them somewhere else and they act totally different. I hate it when people act a certain way with their grandma or at church, then are totally different people at school. I don’t think that you need to be constantly changing your personality depending on the crowd you’re in. I think you need to develop a personality that is appropriate for wherever you happen to be.
I sometimes struggle even knowing who I am, let alone what I need my personality to be. It’s hard to not change for the people you’re around. But as hard as it is, it’s so much easier to just be yourself and make friends that like the real “you” instead of pretending to be someone else and going through the end of a relationship because you lied about who you were.
It’s so hard for teenagers today to know who to be. Whether to be the good kids their church and family want them to be, making it so hard to fit in at school or go with the crowd, being popular but going against their beliefs and values.
This world is so hard to live in, it’s so discriminating against differences and it’s become that the good guys always get the short end of the stick. It’s either you play fair and get screwed over, or play dirty and get what you want. But when you play dirty, you may get what you want but you end up feeling guilty because what you did wasn’t right. How is anyone supposed to make these decisions, let alone teenagers who are still deciding who they want to be? I know being fair isn’t the most popular choice, but now it’s almost an impossible choice.
Which brings me to fairness. In this world, fair isn’t always equal. When you get your “fair share” it’s what you earned. It’s not always spread equally. It’s like the “Little Red Hen” story. The hen raised the wheat to make the bread so she got the bread and since the other animals didn’t help, they didn’t get any. The other animals didn’t think it was fair but it was, they just didn’t put any work into it.
This is also the story of what’s happening in farming families these days. The children who stay on the farm to work in the end, should get their fair share of the inheritance. Fair, meaning what they’ve EARNED on the farm, since they decided to stay. In the big picture, the ones who decided to stay are the ones who made it possible for the rest of the children to have an inheritance. So, in a just world the one who stayed on the farm should get the biggest inheritance; an example of fairness…not always being equal.
In this world today, money is very important. Money can break up friends, marriages and even whole families. Now, even the closest, best families can be broken up by money and inheritances. People don’t realize when they die, what can happen to their family when they have to divide up belongings. It just makes my heart hurt to think that some people can’t look past the money and belongings to see what it’s doing to their relationship with their family and how it makes them look to anyone on the outside looking in. It all comes back to the nice guys finishing last and the ones that don’t play fair coming out ahead.
I sit back and look at this world and the people in it and it amazes me how different it seems to be from even 20 years ago. It seems like the bad things cover up the good things, your hear about all the crimes and no miracles or the celebrities that are always in trouble instead of the child who raised money for a good cause. People don’t see the good in the world anymore even though, unbelievably, it’s still there.
The next time you read the newspaper or watch the news just pray to God about all the things that may not be going well, but also be thankful for the good that’s still left in this world.