The children are our future

When I was child, my parents pushed me always to be the best and most productive person that I could be. They encouraged me to get a good education. They taught me the value of a dollar. I learned that success came from hard work and the proper application of education and skills that I acquired through formal education and life lessons. While I did have a social life, my parents played a major role in the choices I made when it came to hanging out with certain groups and/or engaging in certain activities. My parents believed in supporting me and they also believed in solid and quality family time being spent with the children.

I believe that the foundation that my parents gave me afforded me the opportunity to grow up strong and with sound morals and values. And even though life can sometimes throw me major curve balls, my goal is to still hit them all out of the park! Being the mother of a teenage daughter, I am exposed a lot to other teenagers and I see the stark differences in the way I was raised, versus how a lot of them (not all of them) are being raised now. They are exposed to way too much inappropriate material by way of the television and radios. Parents sometimes take a less active role in helping them make good choices about who to hang out with and what functions to attend. Where I had to be inside my house before the street lights came on, I see children now of all ages being allowed to stay out til the wee hours of the morning. Left to their own vices, and to make adult choices with immature minds. I often hear parents complain about the task they are faced with in raising children. They say they are uncontrollable, stubborn, lazy, and sassy. When I ask these parents how much time they take up with their children, they say, they have to work long hours, or really can't afford to do much with them.

As a result, more and more children are making bad decisions. They are losing their desire to have more, to be better, stronger than the generation that came before them. Instead, they are regressing. They are backtracking and falling in those societal traps that are meant to imprison them mentally and eventually physically. They are becoming more violent, and have less respect for their bodies and their minds than ever before. It's alarming to see that children have such a different mindset than I did growing up. What's even more scary is that these are the people who will run the world when we are too old to do so. Answer these questions for in your mind:

Can you imagine what kinds of decisions that some of them will make as leaders?
How many of them will actually break from the bad habits they developed when growing up being mostly unattended?
Are you confident that the young people around you have a good chance of growing up to be responsible, caring, open-minded and positively driven to want to and put action behind changing the world for the better?
Are you sure they won't make it worse for you? When is the last time you asked a teenager what they wanted to be when they grew up? Did you ask them how they were going to accomplish their goal?
If your answers to these questions alarm you, then why don't you take some action too?

Try mentoring a child? Help to expose a them to something great that they wouldn't otherwise be. It doesn't have to be expensive, and it's very possible that you will be exposed to something that will change your life too! We must remember that we are taking care of our futures too, when we make sure that the children can see one. By preserving their quality of life, we preserve our own.

You can find the Savior in your work!

As children we dream, and we often dream really big!  We aspire to do great things or to help a lot of people.  If we believe that we don't have enough as children, then we tend to hope for having enormous wealth in our adult lives.  Some of us will even begin to map out a way as children to live our dreams.

But as we get older and it is necessary for us to take on responsibility, we can start to become disconnected to what's really important and as a result, we lose the memory of the dreams we had as children.  Our minds become so cluttered with things of only surface importance and we can even forget how to dream.  While in this dreamless state, we often do one of two things: Either we become so complacent that we simply settle for the life we have (though subconsciously it's not the one we want), or two we get restless enough about our situation to make a change.

I have found myself representing both groups in the past. Being a part of the latter group is what changed my life for the better. The biggest dissatisfaction that I had with my life way back then was that I wanted to work for myself. I wanted to be able to live life on my terms all the time. My biggest fear was that without a job where I depended on someone else to write my paycheck, I would wind up with nothing, being forgotten by the world. Until one day, while working at the worst job I have ever had, it hit me! All of the anguish I had while working there was a lot of work! I was tired all the time. I didn't still didn't have all the things I wanted, and there was nothing that the company I worked for was going to do to change that. Those were my problems, not theirs.

I was able to rationalize with myself and say, "Hmm...if you are going to work hard for someone, let it be for yourself!  What do the people in charge here have that you don't have or can't get?"  I took a giant leap of faith, and here I sit.  A successful business owner, working way successfully through a multitude of projects.  I am now happy to get to bed late at night, and can rise early in the morning refreshed, because I decided to go out and do what I love.  We get so caught up focusing on the results of something, that we never realize what a wonderful journey we took to get there!  Sure, I have made mistakes and will undoubtedly make more...its okay...because I am doing what I love to do it doesn't feel like work...and even if it did, it sure still beats the heck out of "working hard" with anguish and disgust for someone who doesn't appreciate it.  As long as you remember that you can take God on your journey, wherever you choose to go- you will find that arriving at the destination is not nearly as enjoyable as is being touched in a powerful way by our Lord and Savior because you "worked" to get there.