So I guess this will be the final blog entry for the year 2007. Not that I have blogged very much. I usually think of things to blog about while driving, but when I get home it has evaporated from my head.
2006 was not a bad year for me. I learned many new things about myself and human interaction. I finally broke into the career field that I want and got a really good job at that. You know how when you are put on the spot you can never think of things? That is how I feel now, cept I did it to myself :S
So what have I learned this year?
This world craves love. The more I study human interaction the more I find this to be the case. I am not talking about any form of physical love. I am talking about the straight up sort of love that embraces all people and all cultures regardless of personal feelings. I also believe that if there were more of this type of love many of the problems would be eliminated that face us today.
The jobs I have held until now have always been consumer based jobs dealing with the public. From my father I have inherited the drive to have things done right. Those two combined Have very much made me into a better leader of people. When I worked at Arbys I was made manager because of that drive but I did not really understand what managing people meant. I tried to be fair to each and that did lead my down the correct path. This year while I worked at Home Depot which is a very large company I was tutored by two of the assistant managers and groomed for a management position. Watching them has really cemented in me the ideas of leadership. Both are great people.
And this, well frankly this suprised me most of all. As most of you know I am a Christian. I try to be as frank about it as possible and am very upfront about almost everything. It seems however that my christian friends are starting to distance themselves from me while my non christian friends are becoming closer. Interesting. And why is that you ask? One of the biggest things I have come to realize this year is that we all have our own personal code of ethics and morals. What is true for one is not true for another. Unconsiously I have been following that for years but just this year have I known about it. What irritates the christians is that they are all under one code. God's code. They know as well as I when they are doing something that goes against that code. When they do that I say something about it. Maybe that is one of my downfalls, cause I sure tick people off telling them when they broke their own moral code. However that is not really what suprised me. The non christians obviously do not hold to the christian values. They do not ascribe to that code in the slightest so why should I hold them to the same values as a christian? To do so would be pushing my beliefs on them in a way that would drive them all away. All of my non christian friends respect that about me, but when my christian friends see that I say nothing when a non christian does something that a christian should not do and I say nothing to that person they get irritated at me and call me two faced and double standarded(Is that a word :S). However this is not the case. Along with the great need for love there also is a great need to judge people by _their_ standards, not our own personal standard. And that is why I believe many people feel judged all the time.
One other thing that I have learned is that people don't really care. Let me explain that a bit. We all have fears about getting in front of people, or what they would think if we acted a certain way. Many times this confines us to a very small box. Sometimes it makes us cowards when we are around a group of people. I was one of the cowards. I would sit in the back of rooms, and avoid eye contact and try to blend with the crowd. Thanks to my amazing music theory classmates I have worked my way through this fear. Being a complete noob to music I was terrified to be asked a question or have to go up to the board, but guess what. They did not dispise me for my lack of knowledge. They did not make fun of the way I write or draw the little black dots with stems called music notes. When I did something way wrong yeah they occasionally laughed but never in an insulting way. Soon I commenced to realize that all of them made mistakes too. Even though some had done music their entire lives. Then I began to examine myself and realized that when someone did something goofy I chuckled then promptly forgot about it. Then my fear was gone. And I believe a big portion of what I wrote before applies here. If they had judged me to their standards of music theory I would have been hopelessly lost and probably flunked out of the class, but rather they gathered around me and helped me learn. And that right there is the kind of love I talked about before. So thanks to them in the most part for all that I have learned this year. If not for my music class helping me get over my fear of people I would not have been freed to see the other things.
I have learned many more things through this last year but those are the major highlights. Now what am I going to do this next year with my new knowledge? For starters I am going to attempt to be more humble so that I can love others. God commands us to love all peoples, but sadly most christians fall short of that, I included. I am going to attempt to teach my fellow christians that as christians we cannot hold non christians to out value system but rather need to love them as they are. And I am going to try to be brave around new people knowing that even if I do do something stupid they do not hold it against me, and probably forget it five minutes after it happens.
I hope to get my thoughts and notes on these concepts up soon so stay tuned. Also I am going to make a more indepth new years resolutions list so look for that as well.
A big thanks goes out to my fellow music theory classmates. Without you and God none of this would have been possible!
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. Bee stings do not normally bother me, but this one was right above my ankle in 110 degree(F) weather and I was doing a lot of walking around so it swelled up like a balloon. Literally was about three times the normal size of my foot. The third day the women in the group (We combined with another group from church, who combined with another group from church) finally made Kyle Fletcher drive me down to the First Aid tent to get it checked out. James Landry went too and he stayed with me while Kyle took the car back to camp. The doctor had the most amused look on his face when he saw my foot and started poking and squeezing it to see if I had any pain. Turns out it was just swollen like I had told the women and he wrapped a bandage around it and released me. Since we were there James asked about his leg, turns out that he has what they dubbed as "Gorge Leg". A common form of heat rash on the leg. So that was fun.
. He suprised my on Saturday by actually passing up going down to the concert with the rest of the group to wait for me to get back from the store. I am glad he did though. He went and grabbed some dinner together and talked about the important things in life (read girls 
). Then went and caught up with the rest of our group and spent an amazing evening worshiping with Chris Tomlin.