Tag Archives: Psalms

Middle-Child Day!

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Happy National Middle Child Day!

…What? You’ve never heard of it?

Neither had I (and I’m a middle child, so…), until I was scrolling along on the Internet this morning and bam! Some ads for TV shows I watch (Fresh Prince, anyone?) were wishing happy middle child days to the middle child of the fictitious TV families. Apparently, this “holiday” comes every August 12, and – not surprisingly – most people don’t know about it. Including myself. Of course, it’s a holiday made up by a blogger somewhere in Somewhere, USA, to slightly jest at what some people call “middle child syndrome”, which in finer terms, is basically the art of forgetting that one of your children (the middle one) exists. I had a really good laugh reading an article written by a middle child on the holiday last year, or as he calls it, “the day the world forgot to celebrate.”

I laugh and joke about being the middle child (and I have such a fantastic family that none of the syndrome “symptoms” apply), but the truth is that many, many people feel just as forgotten as the proverbial middle child. For example, in the Bible, David wasn’t a middle child but he was definitely forgotten, so much so that when the prophet Samuel came to David’s father Jesse’s house to anoint one of them as the new king of Israel, Jesse only presented his first seven sons to Samuel! David came up as an afterthought – Jesse didn’t even mention him until Samuel asked if he had any other sons, and even then, Jesse gave the excuse that he was out tending to the family sheep! (I Samuel 16:1 – 13 NLT) Continue reading →

Special

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These past few weeks, I’ve read and seen various incarnations of a concept that is best summed up in an article I read in early September from the Huffington Post. The article’s subject – Why Generation Y Yuppies are Unhappy – mainly focuses on our generation’s unhappiness in the workplace, and is delved into throughout the proceeding paragraphs, formulas, and diagrams. Ultimately, it concludes that my generation is unhappy (referred to as GYPSYs, or Gen Y Protagonists & Special Yuppies) because we’ve been raised to believe that we are spectacularly special by our Baby Boomer parents. Problems arise when we get out into the “real world”, entering it with “a sense of optimism and unbounded possibility” as a result of our childhoods. One might ask: isn’t an optimistic attitude a good thing in the world? Well, in this case, that optimism supposedly sets us GYPSYs up for colossal disappointment. Because, when our new jobs end up being less fulfilling than we expected, or we end up not snagging the title of “standout co-worker” in the office (namely, we end up being much less “special” than we were led to believe as children), we become unhappy with the reality of our lives falling much shorter than our expectations. To make it worse, that unhappiness can be compounded with the comparisons our generation tends to make between ourselves and acquaintances’ fabricated lives on social media.

Though the author hits upon multiple other points, the unhappiness-in-the-job-market angle stood out the most to me. Now, at first I was slight angry; I mean, what kind of article was this to tell me that I wasn’t special?

“I certainly am one of the few that are actually special,” I grumbled to myself while reading the article. I instantly wanted to write down all the indignant thoughts flowing through my head. But then I decided to take a step back, and spend some moments pointedly thinking on what the article was professing. After objectively looking at the article’s points, I had to say that I did agree with some of them – truthfully, it can be detrimental to compare one’s activities to those seen on social media, because comparisons lead to discontent; and I did agree with the admonition near the end of the article that our generation should never lose our ambition in our life’s pursuits. Continue reading →

The Wait

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Our generation is not about the wait. Many would say, why wait? Instant gratification is everywhere – with food, technology, even relationships.

As customers, we want to be served faster, quicker, now.

People who take their time in certain situations are seen as slackers or less motivated than others.

And when it comes down to it, it seems that speed is even written into the world’s framework, with the seasons sprinting by – a fact brought all too easily to my attention as I’m (already) enjoying the beautiful fall weather during my lunch breaks.

And so I’m left to wonder, what’s the essence of waiting?

For myself, so many things in the world interest me, and I get quite antsy being in the same place for awhile – whether mentally or physically. Sometimes, I find myself wanting to learn so much in so little time because I want to advance to a next stage that I’ll find more interesting that the whole ordeal becomes overwhelming (example: learning Spanish). Continue reading →