Not to change the subject but, I've been feeling led recently to add a 2nd service-related theme to what I began to delve into a little bit about 4 months ago (ministering to incarcerated people). And that is, volunteering for the benefit of elderly people who are alone, or suffering various difficulties.
Boy do I wish every American could be a fly on the wall in some of these other countries. From what I have seen in Mexico, there is just a cultural "norm" of caring for the elderly in a way that just seems so RIGHT to me. On the one hand I love what my Dad taught me about being self-sufficient, because the idea of "work" [to care for what needs to be cared for, which for every person ought to be, at minimum, their own self, plus any others they commit to] .... is so essential to a healthy life and society. And yeah, our current society is struggling a lot right now with this trait.
And it shows in every metric from A to Z, but to start with, the % of Americans on anti-depressants for lack of a good social interactive structure...
It's very sad to me to see so many older people who have really paid their dues in life, struggling along, totally alone in many cases, mostly forgotten, and almost never listened to.
Not only am I impressed a lot with that situation, but at the exact same time, I've concluded that our modern western society has way too much over-emphasized re-inventing the wheel on every subject in the book, rather than, perhaps, the little bit of adjustment that was needed to break people away from absolute servitude to tradition and rules and into a more creative, enabled mindset.........but then, like everything else, it went so far that many have completely lost sight of one thing that will probably never change for as long as the world continues: People who are significantly older than you have had so many more iterations of common experiences than you [me, etc], that if we would just seek more advice from others, we could shortcut finding out many things the long, painful way. This is a true concept not just for Age, but any person experienced in something. The biggest resource we have for life-improvement is to arm ourselves with enough humility to tap others' advice, but this is terribly difficult for our egos, so it goes largely under-utilized.
It's curious if you think about it: A generation so devoted to Scientific principles, largely ignoring the reality that Science involves a lot of being able to discover something New by standing on the shoulders of whoever came before. We tend to be very Scientific until it involves setting aside our ego's. For instance, re-inventing our value system from scratch every generation is the new norm, but how exhausting does that sound !?
So at the same time many elderly people are lonely and neglected in the USA, they simultaneously represent a huge pool of good advice for younger people, even from a selfish perspective!
Think for a moment about the success of nations where respect for the elderly is of utmost importance......
All that to say I'm working on identifying a venue where I can volunteer for this population. Whether they need some material help or just conversations and friendship. I expect it to be an even bigger blessing to me than them, and will post back how it goes!
www.foxnews.com
Federal and/or state laws require all voting materials to be kept for 2+years or until the contested election is decided. But who cares, it was only the evil orange man. It's not looking good for the NYC DA, and the Georgia DA doesn't have a viable case either. They are all just attempts to keep DJT from running again lest he overcome the Democrat machine.
