Growing Heart

Heart grows more than just clinically growth. It grows through relating to other people. From child's to adult's to become parents. Parents is more of a heart than just having kids, imagine having another heart to raise. What will happen if I am going to raise my children when I myself is retarded heartistically?

How Can I be Happy And Fulfilled

You feel happy when your desires are fulfilled. But which desire is essential to real happiness? Knowledge? No. Power? Not really. Wealth? Not for long. True love - fulfilling that desire is the only thing that can make you eternally happy. So, where do we find true love? The best place, the most consistent, stable, healthy and secure place, is the family. It is within the heart of the family that we learn to love older people by loving our parents, embrace humanity by loving our brothers and sisters, and nurture the next generation by loving our children. We have been taught to question everything, including the traditional wisdom that sexual activity is safest and most enjoyable within a faithful marriage. By now, however, it is common knowledge that the misuse of love carries serious consequences. Staying together is smart. It opens the path of eternal love. A family in which there is love between father and mother provides the strongest security for the children. When families are wholesome, crime rates, drug abuse, unwanted pregnancies, abortions and neuroses naturally decline. Everyone benefits. Faithful marriage heals lives. Sexual purity gives freedom. Without taxes, without bureaucracy, the self-healing process develops from the grassroots. Work with families. The family is the foundation for a moral society, a harmonious nation and a peaceful world. Enjoy love. The family is where husband and wife meet in conjugal union, absolute sex, blessed by the Creator of the universe.

The Family

The family is like a garden with joy for all to share, With tender, growing blossoms that thrive on love and care, And when the flowers are gathered for a very special day, They make a bright and beautiful happiness bouquet. (by Mary Loberg)

Guess what troubles young people the most?

What issue most concerns young people today? A new survey from hip, racially diverse California -- home to 1 in 8 of the nation's youth -- provides a startling answer. What does this generation of baggy pants-wearers and body piercers view as "the most pressing issue facing your generation in the world today"? Racism, environmental problems, the war in Iraq? An answer closer to home tops the list: family breakdown. Pundits may find it fashionable to sneer at Ozzie and Harriet, but kids are longing for a harmonious home with mom and dad at the dinner table. Almost 90 percent of survey respondents expect to get married or enter into a life partnership and have children themselves. The survey, titled "California Dreamers," assessed the hopes and fears of young people ages 16-22. Three-fifths of respondents were minorities, and half were immigrants or children of immigrants. The survey was commissioned by New America Media, an association of over 700 ethnic media organizations. "California Dreamers" revealed another surprise. Almost three-quarters of the young people questioned said that religion and spirituality are important to them. In this respect, California's new generation differs substantially from their parents. "Previous polls rank California as having the highest percentage of 'agnostic' adults in the United States," according to the report. "California Dreamers" summarizes its findings this way: "The poll reveals a deep yearning among 16- to 22-year-olds for traditional structures - marriage, parenthood [and] religion." Do Minnesota's young people share these yearnings? Absolutely, says the Rev. Efrem Smith of the Sanctuary Covenant Church, a multiethnic congregation in north Minneapolis. Smith has spent his life working with youth, and speaks nationally on the subject. "This generation is deeply marred by family breakdown," he told me. Many young people are victims of our society's epidemic of out-of-wedlock childbearing and divorce, he says. Even children from intact families often feel neglected by busy or preoccupied parents. "Kids understand that a strong, loving family is the core, the base, of what it takes to develop a moral compass, a sense of purpose, an identity," says Smith, even if many self-absorbed older folks have forgotten this inconvenient truth. Smith's own parents never missed his football games or school talent shows, he says. So he first experienced young people's anger over family breakdown as a varsity basketball coach at Minneapolis' Roosevelt and Patrick Henry high schools, where a substantial number of kids are in poverty. But he was astonished to discover similar frustrations when he left for a stint at an affluent, largely white megachurch in Ohio. "I found kids cutting themselves, having suicidal thoughts," he explains. "Some felt they were last on their parents' priority list. One boy in my youth group told me he was studying witchcraft. 'Why?' I asked. 'I want to be able to cast spells to get friends, to get a girl to go with me to the prom,' he told me. His parents were clueless." Smith sees a connection between kids' anxiety over abandonment and neglect, and their spiritual hunger. As a longtime youth worker, he says, he's convinced that "this void, this hole from having no moral compass or guidance at home, can only be filled spiritually." Kids' interest in religion may seem surprising, given the debased popular culture they inhabit, and the fact that religious expression is frowned on in the public square. "But they're so hungry for love, for a sense of purpose, that they are very open to filling the void spiritually," says Smith. "I've never seen a young person sold down the road to atheism," he adds. "That comes later in life." Smith gives the example of two young men in their late teens whom he encountered recently in a barbershop. "They were gang members, drug users," he says. Why were they living so self-destructively? "As always, family breakdown was at the core," he explains. " 'I had no father in the home, my mom was strung out on drugs,' they told me." The young men hesitated at first to continue the discussion after learning that Smith was a pastor, he adds. "They said, 'We can't talk about our sex lives or cuss in front of you.' But then they acknowledged: 'We care about God, we're hungry for God -- because we're hurting.' " Smith offers a hip-hop worship service at Sanctuary Covenant Church every month to attract young searchers like these. "If you believe that you are beloved of God," Smith says, "that you are made in his image, it doesn't matter if you have two parents or one parent, or if you're being raised by your grandmother or by foster parents. You believe you're on Earth for a purpose, and you can make it." By Katherine Kersten, Star Tribune

Place To Remember

When I came back to my birth barrio after how many years, I cannot just remember any memories, childhood memories I mean. After all my Nanay told me I was just barely four years old when we moved to Cagayan de Oro from Bukidnon. I remember though a light year of traveling then, the smell of buses, the language of trucks, peddlers in bus terminals and well, the carsick. I hate traveling then. I was wondering why Marcos didn't make a straight road from Bukidnon to Cagayan de Oro, I would be comfortable traveling than wishing my whole life when do we gonna arrive in that city. It was a dread of travel than an excitement of getting there actually, after all I will be dead the time we get there. So I ask my cousin where is the harvest be? He pointed gladly with his lips. I know what It means. It's far. "Where exactly"? I protested. "You see that hills"? Yap! "behind that". It was no joke. A five kilometers of twenty degrees elevation. I walked, he was running. I was catching my breath, he was laughing. I thought by time we'll get up there I would be very exhausted. I was wrong. I felt more energetic than when I woke up at four thirty. It was chilly and foggy, but when we reached there I was sweating though the sun has just woke up. "Haha, I woke first than the sun". I'm not a morning guy. It will change and It did. Now I sleep at 1 am the earliest I still have to wake up before five in the morning, but as a vocation than an obligation.

A Time In Washington DC

There has been a time when I looked at the calendars, the pictures rather than dates wondering are there any possibilities if I can ever step these places? Looking at the wonders and breathtaking panorama makes me think big and a kind of impossible, unreachable. But I was walked along the basin in downtown Washington DC I still can't believe how did It happen that my wish just came true. The elation is even indescribable when you are in the place you wanted to be. And its more colorful when the moments is shared to the one that makes you what you are. I mean, I become me because of my wife.