I'm Not Gonna Sit on My Butt and Do Nothin

In our Free Store conversation on Saturday morning we continued talking about what it means to take responsiblity for our own lives.  We started the conversation with a reference to Jesus' statement that if you ask you will receive, if you seek you will find, and if you knock the door will be opened.  It is interesting that in every case the action taken is effective in getting a desired result.  This led us to talk about the importance, not just of being proactive, but of taking effective action that makes a positive difference in our lives.

The question was asked about the most valuable thing we had ever lost?  Sheila said that she had lost her mind which made us laugh.  Our friend Debbie said that she had lost her keys.  So we talked about what is involved in an effective search for something that is lost.  We decided that it involves retracing our steps and looking in the most likely places which means that effective action is not random but purposeful in some way.

At this point the conversation turned to the question about what effective actions we had taken that had improved our lives in some way and made us feel good about ourselves.  Sheila told us that when she lived in Phoenix, AZ that she would take daily bike rides with her grandfather.  She said that "we talked about things and spent lots of time together and became very close."  A new friend said that she used to go out of her way to help a lot of her friends that were users but that she had to start saying no to them.  She said that it wasn't easy but that she felt better about herself and was realizing that she wasn't helping her friends by always doing what they wanted her to do.  We talked a bit about how effective action involves learning to distinguish between building positive mutually supportive relationships with other people as opposed to just being manipulated by them.

Our friend Terrence said that he had stopped blaming other people for his problems.  He said that at one point he just decided, "I'm not gonna sit on my butt and do nothin just because someone else did what they did to me."  He said that it can be a vicious cycle if we don't take positive action for ourselves.  He told us that he had decided that to pursue his education he had to separate from people that were holding him back.  We talked about how effective action is often difficult because our friends and family might not always understand the changes we are making in our lives.

George told us that a thousand things had changed for him in the last couple of years.  He said that when he first went to prison he started working out with one houndred pounds but after a couple of years he was bench pressin about five hundred pounds.  George told us that he looked good and that his girl friend told him that he was "gettin big" which made us laugh and of course we had to tease him for a while about those remarks.  He also said that he felt good about working on his GED after he had given up on it for a while.  This led us to talk about how effective action has to be done consistently rather than just sporadically in order to achieve the positive results that we can feel good about.

One of our new friends said that she thought we were all doin somethin positive because "we're not sittin around waitin for doomsday at 6:00pm" which made us laugh.  This led us to talk about how some peope were expecting the world to end later in the day.  Someone said that we have direct control of some things, indirect control of others, and no control of yet other things. We decided since the end of the world isn't something we could control it didn't make much sense to worry about it.  We laughed when someone said that if you have to change what you're doing because the world is about to end you probably shouldn't be doin that anyway.

As our conversation moved to a conclusion someone mentioned the Michael Jackson song, "Man in the Mirror" with these penetrating lyrics:

I'm Starting With The Man In The Mirror
I'm Asking Him To Change His Ways
And No Message Could Have Been Any Clearer
If You Wanna Make The World A Better Place
Take A Look At Yourself, And Then Make A Change

Our friend George said that all of us have an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other.  He told us that "you gotta make a choice."  That seemed like a good place to end a discussion on the importance of taking effective action to make positive changes in our lives.