Modeling

The songs I'm looking at most for the retreat right now are The End and the Beginning and From the Inside Out. Both songs seem to focus on Reconciliation and God's love, which is kind of what we're going for. I think it would be great if we had the entire S.W.E.A.T. band as our Music Min for the retreat. We would have to change some things around to fit the whole band, but I think it would be really neat. I wonder what we're going to choose.

Somebody told me something that was really shocking/eye opening. She told me that once she stopped hanging out with me, her life took a real downturn. She told me that once I wasn't around anymore, she didn't really have any positive people left in her life and turned to the negatives. I had no idea that I had this kind of effect on a person. I guess it kind of makes me a role model to some of my friends. The funny thing is that I've had this exact same relationship with a handful of other people too. I hang around these people, giving them one-on-one time, then something ends up happening and we end up not talking as much, and eventually drifting away from each other. I've seen a few people really go down some negative paths after our friendship had slowly faded. Coincidence or something more? I don't know, but one thing I do know is this: if my friendship, if our relationship, means that much to you (or maybe you don't realize it at the time), try to keep me around. A lot of times I feel that people just kind of lose interest in me and end up not talking to me anymore. When this happens, I usually just shrug and keep going with my life. I'm not going to force people to hang out with me that don't want to be there, so I'm not going to bother. Sometimes that's not the case though. Sometimes we both get too busy at the same time, and it becomes inconvenient to spend time with each other. This is why I love AIM and Facebook/Myspace: it keeps the conversations (the communication) alive until you can get through all the business. A big thing that I find unfortunate though is that when a lot of my friendgirls get boyfriends, I usually stop talking to them as much. I guess I assume that if they want to keep talking to me, they'll let me know, but at the same time I know that that is poor communication because it requires both parties' consciousness to keep communication channels alive. It's very easy to find this pattern in my life though.

We lost our baseball game today. My goal for the remainder of the season is to teach my kids the difference between having fun and screwing around. I think I can do it. I can be the role model.