Words

All the words have already been created – it is up to you how you use them. Every word has been spoken, and most lines have been used. In a world striving for originality we use the same mundane words over and over again. When we are little we are taught a bunch of words and their meanings, we learn to use them in sentences. As we grow older we find it more and more difficult to form sentences to express what we want to say, we want to string the words in the exact order and make sure our intentions cannot be misinterpreted, because one word can change a life, one word can break a heart, and one word can mend a person. Words have power.

All the good words are taken and all the worthwhile stories have been told. Or that is at least how I feel sometimes. I find stories very interesting, because even though they use the same words, they can be completely different in meaning. Sentences changes words. How we interpret them and how we respond to them is unique in every situation. There are still stories out there waiting for their words to be connected to them, and every good story has to start with a single word somewhere, just like every book starts with a sentence. Connect the words and make a story.

It is funny though, how sometimes the most important message can be conveyed with no words spoken. Silence sometimes speaks so loudly that words can become irrelevant. We show what we feel by every action and sometimes the words left unsaid in the silences are more powerful than those spoken clearly without hesitation. The biggest problem I can see with words left unsaid, is that they can easily be ignored and sometimes misinterpreted.

But as we say too little children, go out and use your words child... Cause words have power.

Weeds

Today I started on a new project, to create a weed eradication plan for our company. I need to develop a plan / management strategy to prevent the weeds from taking over our soil and to remove them if they become a problem. I have not started on that yet, because just the thought of it had me wondering all morning. Weeds are created weeds; they weren’t beautiful flowers, with potential to be planted in someone’s pristine garden and made some wrong choices which made them the weeds of the Plantea kingdom. They are a menace to the rest of the plants. They use more water than they are worth and they invade areas where they aren’t welcome.

The New shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines a weed as an herbaceous plant not valued for use or beauty, growing wild and rank, and regarded as cumbering the ground or hindering the growth of superior vegetation... Applied to a shrub or tree, especially to a large tree, on account of its abundance in a district... An unprofitable, troublesome, or noxious growth.

So weeds are just plants not valued for their beauty and use? Some of them do actually have uses. Why is some vegetation superior to others? Why has it been created with superiority? Should all plants not be equal? Should we not value each plant for what it has to offer, even if it is just a little different, maybe a bit poisonous or troublesome?

The Britannica Encyclopaedia has this to say about weeds: 

“A weed, is any plant growing where it is not wanted. Ever since human beings first attempted the cultivation of plants, they have had to fight the invasion by weeds into areas chosen for crops. Some unwanted plants later were found to have virtues not originally suspected and so were removed from the category of weeds and taken under cultivation. Other cultivated plants, when transplanted to new climates, escaped cultivation and became weeds. The category of weeds thus is ever changing, and the term is a relative one.”

Thus one persons weed can be another person’s superior plant species. We need to start making sure that we don’t classify weeds solely based on our own opinion. It is a relative term and the plants involved can be hurt in the process. Make sure that what you see as a weed isn’t someone else’s rose. It is all just a matter of perspective. Learn to tolerate.

Having said that, I need to start on my weed eradication plan... oi.

Success

How do you define your success? Do you set definite goals and targets for you to meet? Do you need to be somewhere you weren't a year ago? Do you have the need to be recognized as a great person or leader by others? Do you need followers? Do you need people to acknowledge that what you say is good and true and validate your ideas and existence? Do you need to feed or serve to a certain amount to make you a better person? What defines your success?

Do you even know what it is you need to achieve success as? We look at what we want to do and measure our success by worldly standards. If you look at a man like Noah, Noah was an excellent shipbuilder, but that wasn’t his main profession – Noah was a preacher. In worldly standards we would have called him a terrible failure as a preacher, 7 converts in 120 years (all family members) - not a good track record. He was a failure by worldly standards. Also look at Jeremiah, great preacher – no results though. He fell out with all the religious crowds, fell out with royalty and weren’t all too popular with the plain folks either. The only one he seemed to please was God.

Same with Jesus, He was also such a failure by worldly standards – He never printed a book, didn’t build a school for the blind, didn’t organize a church group or a bible study or do any of the things we see as a necessity to ensure our wellbeing and high standing in the world (or even in the church). He preached for 3 years, healed and fed thousands and yet when it was over, He had no one left and appeared to but a few after He was resurrected. He was denied and betrayed by those closest to Him, all men forsook Him and fled. He was a failure by every worldly standard.

But by Godly standard He was GOD. He had a different measure of success than we do as people. Should we not rather try to measure up to His standard of success?

We view people as successful when they can get the job done. We need to figure out by what standard of success we measure our lives and our ministries. 

A pastor I listened to a while ago asked the question, “Is God and end or is He a means?”

And also "Are we serving men in the name of God or serving God in the name of men?"

Scar-tissue

I realized this weekend just how much I enjoy being on my own. I will be happy on my own. It is not because I truly think I will be a more fulfilled happy person alone, but because I don’t think I am built for things falling apart around me. What if I fell in love, I liked it, started needing it and shaped my life around it and then it all just fell apart. I wouldn't be able to handle that kind of pain. I wouldn't be able to pick myself up and carry on. I am a strong person, but I do not love in halves – I love completely, with all I am in a stupid; ‘I love your music, I’ll cook you breakfast’ kind of way... this type of love creates scars in unexpected places, and those scars never properly heal. We carry them with us everywhere we go and though the cut’s long gone, the pain still lingers.

“There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.” - Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

If you keep your expectations from others to a minimum, you won’t be heartbroken and disappointed the whole time. It might sound very morbid, but it is true. If you depend on others you can expect heartache and failure, hell, even if you only depend on yourself, you can expect failure (significantly less though). We’re human, we’re broken and we live by mending, all our scars are road maps and diagrams that explain where we've been and where we are heading. They are lessons that we sometimes have to learn over and over again. We’re stubborn and stupid, hell-bent on surviving. But not only surviving, we want to achieve excellence, and be remembered for what we contributed. And we want to love and be loved back.

We all have enough scar tissue in our hearts to know that we should not simply love, trust or hope, because it hurts like hell. Some of us listen to the diagrams in our hearts. Others completely ignore it. I know that if I love I will get broken more, I avoid caring too much if at all possible, but sometimes it sneaks up on you from behind, and you wake up one morning realizing that you care too much for someone.

How do you now rectify that? How does one stop caring?

Meredith Grey said that losing love is like organ damage. It's like dying. The only difference is; Death ends. This? It could go on forever...

The Next Next Generation

Imagine growing up and all your baby pictures are not only stacked up in your parents entrance hall, but also every picture of every burp and embarrassing thing you've ever done is posted on your mom’s Facebook timeline and all over the rest of the internet. Now everything you have ever done is on display for the world to see, either captured in a picture or a status. If you Google yourself, you can find your whole life on the internet. This is not something we think about. But it is a reality our kids are going to face.

I personally think that our little act of entertainment will screw up our children royally. I have previously said that we all broadcast too much of ourselves – but we also broadcast too much of those that are entrusted to us. Imagine reading a blog your mom or dad wrote in their 20’s. Our kids are going to grow up with it. They are going to be able to find out what we were doing when we were in our 20 somethings, by scrolling down our Facebook timeline, reading our tweets, etc.

Post responsibly. Once you posted something on the internet you can’t ever really fully delete it. Our tech savvy kids will be able to dig it up. They will see your drunken party pictures, judge you by your profile pictures, see how many people you dated and when. Your whole youth will be out there, for them and their friends to see and for them to call you on. No hiding that you were also a person before you became a parent (I of course grew up with the notion that my parents were never young, they've just always been parents, and have only recently found out that they had lives before they had kids, shocker!).

Will they be more popular in school because of the amount of likes their baby page has? What happens to the kid who has no Facebook page of his or her own, created by their loving mom? Is he/she immediately labelled an outcast?

You might think that these things are cute now, and easier than sending Christmas cards with photo updates, but think about the long run. I personally don't want to see pictures of me as a baby in a bathtub on the internet, and I don't know that many people that will want to.

I think my generation are producing some messed up kids. Facebook is not your personal family album! Think before you post!