The old saying "Rome wasn't built in a day" is best used describing the time and patients its takes to make a change. We all have different abilities that add to pieces to the over all goal of the group. Social activism brings out the best of every person, showing us who we really are and what we are best at doing.
In our last class we discussed several reasons why we do not get involved in community service. Time and not recieving an immidiate recognistion seemed to be the biggest barriers in ourlives. This chapter, to me, seemed to be talking about how to over come the barriers and challenges we face. Loeb says, "nothing gets accomplished when we try to do everything at once."
My community involvement has shown me that I have to do things one step at a time and after a while the progress starts to show. I am very involved in my neighborhood block watch, local elementary school, my church, being a full time student, and now being involved in slice. Just last night, at GCC, I was attending a guest speaker, whom I found very interesting. Unfortunitely, like the rest of my day, I had somewhere to be in the middle of it. I felt ashamed to have to leave early because I felt I was being rude. My biggest challenge is time, since, I always have somewere to be and something to do.
Luckily, my community involvement has shown me that I am a strong and understanding person. I feel being able to understand and comprehend the problems someone is going through and the struggles we all face is what will keep me involved in my community. My Christian background has encouraged me to keep my faith strong and no matter what anyone says I am me. In my high school we pulled together an event called "I Am Moon Valley," it demonstrated we are a one community and together is how we will make a difference.
The things I have done in my life have had more of an affect on me when I see the people I helped. The change took time, but the wait was well worth it when someone's life was changed for the best. Its hard to imagine that I made a difference, no matter how little, by managing my time and being around other leaders.
I totally agree with you that time is one of the biggest obstacles in the way of volunteering. I always let time be my excuse and finally one day I just decided that there is never going to be the "right" time to get involved. I am always going to have things going on in my life so I might as well just go for it and see what happens. I also really like how you talked about your source of strength coming from your faith, I feel the same way, without it in my life I definitely wouldn't be who I am today.
ReplyDeleteSkylar,
ReplyDeleteit is great that you know where your strength comes from, and that you utilize that strength to do service. I am glad that you acknowledge the lessons that you are learning in class, but now you should try to apply those lessons to your life. We mentioned how time is a large obstacle to overcome; however, we also came up with some solutions. Maybe it's time to use a new method of time management in order to meet all the activities you choose to be involved in.