Column - Make most of opportunities

Talk about it

One blink of an eye and the school year has almost come to an end.

It seems like just yesterday I was on the phone nervously calling my first interviewee for an article.

Those days have come and gone, but there is not a second in the day that I don’t think about them.

By doing this internship at the Alexandria Echo Press Newspaper this year, I have turned a dream into an opportunity and an opportunity into a passion.

My dreams of being a journalist have always floated around as an invisible idea inside my head.

If I were to approach myself five years ago and tell myself that I was one day going to be reporting for the newspaper, I would have laughed at myself.

That is what I observe a lot of people doing in the world each day.

We do not anticipate or fully embrace the opportunities that we have been given.

When we come to the event, the opportunity that could have had quite an impact on our lives is either not taken full advantage of or passed by as a whole.

I think this is due to the lack of faith that people have in God and more faith in human beings.

Hearing a story and faithful advice from two of my friends earlier this week helped me realize this and prompted me to write about this exact issue.

The other day all three of us were out to lunch working on a project, when my friends started talking about their plans for next week’s Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA) meeting.

They’re part of a group of high school students, parents and other people who come together to praise and worship God for the blessings that are given to them each day.

They began to talk about how people deal with their problems in life. An example: When someone has been working hard at a company for years and trying to move up in management, but then some other person comes along and grabs the position without a blink of an eye.

Or when a family member dies of something such as cancer or a heart attack.

People don’t think it is fair that they lost out on a job or lost their relative too early.

Then they begin to question their faith in God and eventually get mad at him for what he did not do for them.

People think that just because they go to church and pray to God each day that they have to get some reward or trophy.

As they were talking about this I silently thought to myself, “This describes how I have been acting for the past few months.”

I have been letting the drama of school, work, sports and life in general burn me out.

When something does not work out for me, I then get angry and feel like I am losing who I am.

I think when problems happen, people tend to get angry at God and lose their faith in him, sometimes completely giving up on talking and praying to him, which is kind of ironic, because that is saying that we only use God when it is convenient for us.

The truth can hurt, which it did for me when I thought about this and actually had to face my reality.

I was telling myself that as a senior I could just slow down and relax the rest of the year, but what God was trying to tell me was finish strong so that I will have full ambition going into college.

When I thought it out, it made lots of sense. All the studying and work that I had done to this point narrowed down to the few weeks of school I had left.

If I was working so hard my whole school career to study and learn for the future, why give up now?

I was not going to. When I showed up the next week at the Echo Press, there was a new energy inside me, a renewal in faith.

God had motivated me to finish the year strong and go out with a bang.

That is the message that needs to be emphasized. Lots of people go through life winging everything on half throttle and doing as little as possible.

This is not the way to live life. Although it may save time and energy to put less effort into your work and home life, it takes away from the love that a person truly possesses.

God gave human beings the ability to make life the opportunity that each individual wants to live for his/her own personal liking.

If a person says that they are unhappy or cannot do a certain thing, it is because he/she is defeated by something in life or has yet to discover the ability that is in his/her own heart.

For me, God gave me the natural born talent to write my heart out on paper.

With this talent, I believe that I am bringing not only difference to myself as a career and personal satisfaction, but also impacting the heart of at least one human being.

Therefore, without God giving me the ability, I would not be where I am today.

“It’s Our Turn” is a weekly column that rotates among members of the Echo Press editorial staff.

Tags: our turn, jordan peterson, opinion, columns