Blog for Hope - Golo Yard Sale on 09/12

Good morning everybody!

Blog for Hope will be hosting a yard sale to benefit families who are experiencing hardship due to the shaky economic conditions. The event will be held on September 12 between 8am and 12pm at the parking lot of Eastgate Shell, 4043 Wake Forest Rd in Raleigh NC.

If you have items you would like to donate fto the sale, please get in touch with me at lunanera@netzero.net and please include "Golo yard sale" on the subject line. No attachments, please.

Have a wonderful, relaxing weekend, and always remember that if everyone gives a thread a poor man will have a shirt.

Blessings to all!

One for The Books - How a Young Man Beat the Odds and Built a New Life for Himself

"Be miserable. Or motivate yourself. Whatever has to be done it's always your choice."~ Wayne dyer


Dwayne Betts grew up in Suitland, Md, a mildly rough suburb of Washington DC, where for several of his teen years he walked the fine line between a honest life and one of crime – although he was a promising student, he hung around with the wrong crowd, experimented with light drugs even if he never sold them, rode in stolen cars but didn't steal them himself until a fateful night in 1996, when in a “moment of insanity”, as he calls it, he made the wrong decision and carjacked a man outside a mall.

He admitted his guilt, was charged as an adult and sentenced to nine years behind bars. He spent his time in prison reading everything he could put his hands on, and once he finished serving his sentence, he attended college, and earned a bachelor degree from the University of Maryland. He also started a reading club for young men and wrote a 237-page memoir entitled “A Question of Freedom”. His mission is to create reading programs for young inmates, hoping that the power of the written word will touch their lives as much as it touched his. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/01/AR2006100101160.html

Dwayne Betts is seen as an inspiration for trouble youths, but on a larger scale he can be considered a role model for most of us. Regardless of individual circumstances, most of us have made poor choices at one time or another and engaged in acts we have regretted dearly, but few have actually used those consequences to better themselves.

Whenever reactions catch up with actions, we have one choice to make – we can allow past transgressions to get the best of us by knocking down our spirit and let us roll in a puddle of self-pity and guilt, or we can take stock of reality, and use the tools we have available to us to rise against all odds.

Dwayne Betts could have chosen to beat himself up for the poor choices he made - and could have continued to wallow in the pain he had inflicted on those who loved him and suffered because of his actions - but if he had done so he would be just another statistic, a repeat offender who can’t move from the stump because he doesn’t believe he has other options.

Instead, he never felt cornered because he saw his escape in books. He accepted he had done wrong, paid his price and found the silver lining in the cloud; now he is enjoying the rewards of his inner strength.

All situations, no matter how negative they appear, can be turned into positives – all it takes is to make a conscious choice to not be defeated.

Living One Life at a Time - A Reflection Upon Allowing Others to Make their Own Mistakes

“Letting go doesn't mean we don't care. Letting go doesn't mean we shut down. Letting go means we stop trying to force outcomes and make people behave. It means we give up resistance to the way things are, for the moment. It means we stop trying to do the impossible--controlling that which we cannot--and instead, focus on what is possible--which usually means taking care of ourselves. And we do this in gentleness, kindness,
and love, as much as possible.” ~ Melody Beattie


I read a wonderful article on the News & Observer yesterday, in which a mother described how hard it had been for her to allow her children to work on their projects without becoming involved, even if it meant that the projects turned out far from perfect.

Their journey began a few years before, when they joined a series of free kids workshops offered by Home Depot. After the first workshop, the mother was not too sure things had gone as well as she had hoped – little fingers were smashed, the bird house the kids had built was falling apart, and clothes were ruined by wood glue – yet, as time passed, the kids learned important skills.

The hardest thing during the workshops, the mother explained, was to sit back and watch the kids make mistakes without intervening; the greatest lesson, she realized, had been her own – it didn’t matter if the projects weren’t perfect; what mattered was that the children were learning how to read instructions and use tools more efficiently. Mom’s input was not needed.

Allowing others to make their own mistakes is probably one of the greatest challenges we can ever face. Especially in the case of people we love, we wish we could live their lives for them when we feel they are not doing a good job of it on their own, so that we could “fix” their mistakes and help them live a happier existence.

Each of us has a different path to follow, which is not always for others to understand. Even if all we find at the end of the path we chose is misery, we have the right to make those mistakes and learn from them.

Letting go of the control we wish to have on the lives of others is, in many ways, synonymous of letting go of judgment. We can’t expect to understand the many reasons behind the choices others make, just as we can’t truly know what is best for them; all we can do is accept their choices as their own right, and move on with our own lives. We can only live one life at a time – ours or other people’s.

We can’t control the way someone else feels or acts, but we do have ownership on whether we allow their choices to affect our immediate world. By focusing less on what others do, and more on what we choose for ourselves, we can grow in ways we didn’t think possible, and the weight we carry for them is suddenly lifted.

We can’t change others, but we can change ourselves. And by letting others follow their own destiny we might be pleasantly surprised in the end.