Earlier today I was typing my daily prayer, scripture, and reflection for my spiritual blog, Breaking Bread With Natasha. As I was typing I was realizing that my passion was taking over and it was getting lengthier than any post I have ever written for that blog. So I decided to shorten it, take the remaining work and post it on my other blogs. Below is the entire reflection but I have changed the title of course to reflect a change in platforms. I’m sure I’m going to step on some toes, but change doesn’t come when we’re feeling great, it comes in times of rain and pain. Take it all in and then share your thoughts:

Stop Relying on Government to Change Your Circumstances

We elect officials to help govern this land from a human perspective, to provide a human touch to life’s circumstances that we created generations before and we make worse for generations to come. Yet, we only support these officials in the early days or when our specific needs are met consistently. We don’t consider the thousands and millions of individuals this official must take into consideration with every decision made, because in our twisted minds he or she should be able to do all things for all people, starting first with us.

We create Messiah’s and forget that only God can do all things, be all places, see all things, and has the power to change the impossible to possible. Our lack of commitment and devotion to God clouds our thinking and our understanding of human government, and that man is limited even as a pure reflection of God. If we want to see change in our neighborhoods, communities, cities, counties, states, regions, countries, and throughout the world we must be the change and bring about the change we want to see.

Why have we grown content with the lazy person’s approach to service and community development? Why have we taken on a welfare mindset where we are waiting on something to happen, waiting on the graffiti and trash to disappear from our streets, waiting on money and resources to come to us?

God didn’t tell Moses to wait on the Egyptians to free His people, God said for them to take their freedom. Then He molded them for over 40 years, reprogramming them from a slave mentality to that of an empowered, enlightened, self-sufficient, resourceful, and educated people. Yet then, as we do now, the Israelites complained and whined about how they were better off before Moses freed them because at least they knew what was coming each day, and they had food and shelter, and a routine they could depend on.

Freedom was too disturbing of a concept for many of them. Freedom and the concept of free enterprise seems too disturbing for many of us to grasp and accept as a way of life today.

Now present day we have people complaining how life was better in the past, “better three years ago“, and during each Presidency we hear the same ignorance just re-phrased different ways, and in each Presidency the current President gets blamed not only for what has happened today but what took place 20-40 years prior that led up to the crises of today. We humans never seem to be satisfied. We don’t really want what we ask and pray for.

We want hand outs in the form of “hook ups“, even though we claim we want hand ups, but a hand up requires hard work and effort from both participants; our society just wants it to mystically, magically appear and we want the President and our elected officials to do it yesterday, because we’re too impatient to wait for next week, let alone next month or next year…heaven forbid we must a few years.

We’re too self-absorbed to wait for God to provide on His time, so we throw our expectations onto men and women who are just like us and have less power than we know, and then we complain when they can’t perform to our standards…standards we can’t even reach or sustain.

We want crime eliminated today. We want streets to always be clean and bump-free, and buildings and walls graffiti-free every second of the day. We want pollution to be no more. We want millions of jobs created right this very second. We want the economy to always be up, booming and prosperous. We want new technology and innovative ideas flowing through and bringing more jobs to our country. We want teen pregnancy to disappear right now. We want all diseases gone like yesterday. We want marriages to mean more than temporary moments of insanity and selfishness, we want…we want…we want!

But how many of us are uniting to bring our communities together to pick up trash and debris on our streets, paint over the graffiti, and tell those who terrorize our neighborhood, “not here, not now, not ever again!”? How many of us are practicing safe sex, getting tested regularly, remaining monogamous and committed to only one person and sexually active with only one person? How many of us are saying marriage vows and devoting ourselves to that one person as a declaration and pledge to God and family? How many of us are starting small businesses and then hiring people in the community so that there are jobs? How many of us are mentoring our youth and sponsoring our peers into positions of access, knowledge, and wealth?

A great leader has discernment and knowledge, and through God they are able to bring order to the chaos. It requires each of us to be leaders in our homes, in our neighborhoods and communities…united we bring about the change we want to see…united we bring the order. Let’s stop talking about it, complaining about it and placing blame on others, and let’s start doing something about it! Take back your neighborhood from the pimps, drug dealers, prostitutes, murderers, rapists, child molesters, con artists, gang members, taggers, and knuckleheads. Change the thinking that sagging pants and too-mini-to-be-a-skirt is sexy, and re-program the minds to believe and embrace that a person of intelligence and wisdom (with great common sense) is the ultimate embodiment of sexiness.

Become a mentor and tutor to our youth and to those adults who need help most, show them through your daily walk what a servant-leader truly is! If you want to change the mindset and the motivation of a person, you need to present a better model for them to emulate. Be that model!

Stop seeing your neighbor as a liability and instead see how you can both be an asset to your community. Take back your neighborhood from the slave mentality of, “when we gonna eat?” and reprogram a mindset of, “I’ve gotta get up and go to work to put food on the table“. Take back your family and stop saying, “I can’t get a job” and go make a job if none are available by starting a business. We all have talents, find yours and market it to the world. Take back your life by getting past your pride and ego that refuses to take a job that pays less than what you desire, or has duties and responsibilities that are  “beneath” you.

Opportunities just like ideas are not solely for one person, if you don’t take advantage of them someone else will.

Take back your life by removing the words “can’t” and “impossible” from your vocabulary, and find the person, group, or organization that can help you get where you need to be. My dad always said, “don’t say you can’t do something, you might as well just say you don’t want to do it…” My dad despised laziness and mediocrity. He used to tell me, “…Tasha even if you marry a garbage man, it doesn’t matter, as long as he’s one of the hardest working garbage men out there…and make sure you give him all of your love and support because he will get psychologically beat up every day in the world, but when he comes home he needs your love, care and support” and I have always held those words close to my heart and applied them in my personal life for my father was a wise man beyond his years and he never gave me empty words of counsel.

So I say to you, if you want to see change, starting first with where you live then research how to form community clean-up days, neighborhood watch groups, mentoring and tutoring groups, and see what you can do to make this world a better place!

If on the other hand you’re waiting on the government to solve all of your problems, feed you, clothe you, provide you with a job, provide you with housing and a way for you to get loans from banks you will later curse; a government that will then make sure the economy is doing great so you can spend money you don’t have so that you can later complain about being broke…then you will have to wait in line with the other “talkers” and complainers. But make sure to move far enough out of the way for the dreamers, doers, and ambassadors of hope who are marching through with a new goal to achieve, a new mission to fulfill, and a new vision for the future. For we don’t have time to dwell on yesterday, or complain about today, because we’re too busy making things happen for tomorrow.

Once you decide your role you’re claiming in this big ole’ world let me know.

– Natasha L. Foreman, MBA

 

Copyright 2011. Natasha L. Foreman. All Rights Reserved.