HELP!

It's great when people try to help. Because they really do try. My mom and dad like so many others try to give me the answers to problems I don't have, or they insist that their one solution, which won't work for me, is the only solution. Or my counselor who is very sweet and surely cares a lot about her clients, but is so fluffy and overdone that I spend the whole time picking through the glittering generalities, and I feel like I'm at Sunday mass. For me, Sunday mass was always a gathering of people who felt that they needed more than they already had. So many people praying for things they don't need. And the kicker for me was the contradictions. These people all believe that when people die it is because God takes them because he needs them to be with him again for one reason or another. Contradiction number one is here because they claim that God is all-powerful, so why would he need some human soul to help him do whatever it is he needs to do? I'm no scripture scholar, and I have no belief that I know a damn thing about God beyond what the 10 Commandments and Jesus told all of us, but that just seems a little silly. But I'll go out on a limb on this one. The main problem I've always had with this is the fact that if someone is dying, then obviously God needs them right? So if we are praying to keep them alive, all we're really doing is begging God to not take someone from us whom He needs, right? That boils down to a 4 year old begging his mom to let him do the exact opposite of what she already told him he must do. But a lot more four year olds. In the end death is inevitable, and God will eventually take all of us, so why not let it happen when you know it is coming, where you can prepare yourself for the grief, and expedite the situation so that the dying person doesn't have to be suffering. Plus that was you aren't blindsided by their death. Maybe that's just me and my bad experience with being blindsided by a death, then again this is my blog, so I suppose you're reading this to hear my opinion, aren't you? Poor you.

However, this isn't my way to test peoples' faith, because in the end people believe what they need to believe in order to survive and thrive, me included. This is, in fact, about help. The reason I started about Sunday mass was because even though I don't get anything directly from the fluffiness, I can pick out the things that do help me from that fluffiness. However, my counselor unknowingly helped me discover something today. I always avoided going to counseling because I despised the fluffiness of it. I have always, in at least some way, felt like in those situations I was treated like a child. However, I have realized I only have myself to blame for that. It works for me exactly how she(my counselor) wants it to, just in a roundabout way. It makes me look inside myself and see the value and hope within. It helps me really see how I feel about myself and start to get at the roots of the problems I have. The only difference is that this happens because the fluffiness makes me smile( sometimes because I feel silly) and it gives me hope. And in the end that's what I need, is hope by the truckload. So in the end, I end up conforming to exactly what she wants and her plan works perfectly.

But I wouldn't be giving you my full opinion today if I didn't tell you the irony of today. Because my life, as the one or two of you regular readers will find, is full of irony. And as today is about help, this is about the irony of help in life. As many of you could probably see coming, the irony here is that most people offer a lot of help, but don't know how to receive it. I can also say from experience that the people who offer the most help(usually in the form of 'friendly advice'), are typically the ones who are crying out for it. Unfortunately this is not usually a quid pro quo relationship. Rarely do people offer help with the intention of receiving it and actually get what they expect. Yet they keep trying, not because they have too much pride to ask for help, but moreover because they don't know how to ask for what they want.

The other problem is that the majority of the populous doesn't want help. The problem with living in a country where every person can be independent is that if given the choice, most people will do just that. The empowering nature of independence makes them believe that they know everything and nothing that anyone else can tell them can help them more than what they already know. Moreover they don't think they have any problems for anyone to help them fix. It's these people that I feel for because they are different and worse than people like me. People like me are willing to ask for help, though they don't know where to find the type of help that they know they need. The others though, don't accept that they have problems, and therefore don't want to fix what they won't accept aren't broken, and of course have no idea what type of help they need, how to find it, ask for it, get it, or use it effectively. My life is full of hope. The reason my heart bleeds for these people is because their life has no hope until they become like me. And in the end that's what they need. They need that wakeup call. And all the while they are fighting the one thing in life they need more than anything else.

Quote and thought for the day:

“Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost,
No birth, identity, form--no object of the world.
Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing;
Appearance must not foil, nor shifted sphere confuse thy brain.
Ample are time and space--ample the fields of Nature.
The body, sluggish, aged, cold--the embers left from earlier fires,
The light in the eye grown dim, shall duly flame again;
The sun now low in the west rises for mornings and for noons continual;
To frozen clods ever the spring's invisible law returns,
With grass and flowers and summer fruits and corn.”

~ Walt Whitman