Blog Response #6

Dear God,

          Thank you for everything you have blessed me with, I am very thankful for your blessings.  I pray for myself that I have a great academic and athletic year and that I have fun in my sophomore year.  I pray for my mom that she gets a break from all of the stress in her life that she has to deal with.  I pray that you heal my mom and that she knows that we appreciate all that she does and that we are here for her when she needs someone to lean on.  I pray for my sister that she enjoys her eighth grade year and makes the most of it.  I pray that my sister knows she can open up and talk about her feeling and not have to bottle it up like the rest of us.  I pray she also has a great academic and athletic year.  I pray for the three of us to stay strong in all that we do and to stick together because each other is all we have.  I would also like to pray for everyone in the world in need of a prayer. Thank you God for everything.  Besmelaheh ramoneh raheem, Amen.  Love you dad, love you momajoon.  Love you mom, love you Noosha

Blog Response #5

          "Prayer is fundamentally a gift, a grace always already given by God. Prayer does not create God's presence; it simply helps us become aware of the ways in which God is already present" (Art and Practice of Spiritual Direction Mercy Center Burlingame, CA).  This really speaks to me because praying to God is an important and huge part of my life.  My family needs all the prayers they can get right now and it helps to know that God makes it possible for us to talk to him and let him know what is going on in our lives.  God is always there to listen and I feel my relationship with him has developed over the years to be stronger and stronger because I do personal prayers to him and thank him for his blessings all of the time.  We are lucky to have the many opportunities to be able to pray to God about anything and we should thank him for blessing us with these many chances.  The point of this quote is to emphasize the idea of how prayer is a God given gift that helps us, as people of God, become aware of how and when God is present in our lives.  

Blog Response #4

      I support The Crucifixion story written by Luke, the Gospel writer, in Luke 23:33-43.  Luke's version is a lot more detailed and shows the crucifixion from everyone's perspective.  This specific crucifixion story makes it easy for the reader to visualize themselves in the situation because they are reading the responses and reactions of the people at the Skull.  Luke also showed a very realistic version of the story because he did not just show the happy version.  Luke showed the more negative side of the story, which I support due to the fact that almost no story is perfectly positive because there are almost always hardships in someone's path of life.  Luke showed how not everyone is going to be positive towards you and that you have to carry yourself the same way Jesus did by staying as calm as possible and by not letting the haters phase you.  God says that vengeance is never the answer and it should be left for him to do.  It is not our job to seek revenge on one who has done wrong to us because we would then be just as harmful as the person who did wrong to us.  Our job is to just stay kind because the best vengeance is to kill them with kindness.