UnderNewManagement

That is a very good question. I try to ask myself that at least every day. I have recently become involved in church again for the first time in almost 9 years. It is shocking to me that I have been gone from the church that long but my life has definitely changed for the better. I used to be cynical about church going folks, I thought that they are going so that they could look down their noses at people that don’t go. I was wrong.
The church I attend now is Highland Baptist Church of Moore. The people there are genuine and they work very hard at making everyone feel welcome. I am very happy right now in my life and that is saying something as I have suffered from depression and sleep depravation most of my life. This is no pseudo-euphoria or drug induced elation, I am happy. My relationships with my kids and my wife are better now than they have ever been; I am closer to my brother than I can ever remember. Bring an open mind and I’ll save you a seat up front.

As a child you heard your family tell stories that begin with ‘when I was your age’ and you promised yourself that you would never do that to your children. Now I am 32 and have started telling my kids the ‘when I was your age’ stories. I understand my dad’s frustration at seeing me upset at my childhood hardships and he was just trying to teach me that he had hardships in his youth and he was able to overcome them. Now I see those frustrations in my son and I am finding it hard to tell him about how hard I ‘had it’. I can see that he does not have the responsibilities that I had, and, he does not have the freedom that I had either. I grew up in the time of people starting to lock their doors. There was no fear of child abductors at that time. My brother and I would ride our bikes all over the city where we lived. Several Saturdays we would leave at 10am on our bikes and not be home till 3pm or later. We never got in trouble for being gone. Now, my kids go out to play and they have to ‘check in’ every half-hour. There are flyers about child molesters ‘in your neighborhood’ and Michael Jackson on the news everyday, if my son thinks he has a hard life just wait till he is an adult.

It was just last week, I was down stairs in the ER and I got an order for a chest x-ray on a gentleman that had been in a car wreck. I try to treat my patients as if they are someone I know quite well, like a member of my family. I began asking questions about his life, like what he does for a living, and he told me about how he wanted to work in a hospital. I asked him what type medical education he has and he said he is a Medical Assistant (a very limited certificate offered by a local ‘college’, it is basically a medical office license). I told him that he should think about going back to school and getting a degree in Nursing or Medical Laboratory Technology, or even X-ray. At this time I pointed out that he wasn’t injured much and that maybe it was fate that he crashed his car and came to the hospital, to run into me. His eyes welled up with tears and he said that he needed this motivation to help get him back to school. This is not the first time I have been in this situation. I like to think of myself as the Johnny Appleseed of inspiration; planting little seeds in people’s minds of what they can do with their life. The world needs people to do the tough jobs; there are plenty of burger flippers out there. As my brother would say: Aspire to inspire.
Take a minute to look at your life. Are you doing what you really want to do? Have you ‘settled’ for a job that you are not happy with? Today is the day to change your life. You see what your life is like now, always waiting for tomorrow to sweep in and change you. You have to get up and change your life yourself. Stop wishing your life away and do something, do it now!