It was a normal “Double Blessing Friday”. We went to the pool and had a blast. Anthony and I did fifty push-ups. We relaxed until Shabbat time. We invited Rob and Javi over to our house for a Shabbat meal and it was good. When we had all our ice cream set up and when we were just about to dig in we heard several gun shots just outside our house. I ran to the window (not a smart idea by the way) to see what was going on and I just saw five or six people ducking down and running away. The barbecue that our next door neighbor's were enjoying was done in a matter of seconds and everybody had bolted inside the house or were ducking behind a car. I heard six more shots and a pause then four more. Then I saw a man running away with a rifle in his hand. Once I saw him leave we opened the door to see what was going on a few people jumped in there cars and took off (understandable)and everybody else slowly came out out of their hiding spots. I thought it was a drug related thing because there has been a huge increase of drug trafficking going on here in the past few weeks and a few people were shot at a few days ago over some drug stuff. We talked to a few of the neighbors and found out that this guy was just shooting at random. No one knew him or knew why he was shooting or what he was shooting at, he just decide to shoot because he could. The only person that was injured was a 15 month old baby. She wasn't shot but something hit her on the back of the head and she started bleeding quite a bit. After the police, paramedics, and News crew came and went everything seemed to go back to normal. We ate our ice cream, the barbecue continued and kids went outside playing duck behind the car. THAT”S NOT NORMAL!!!!! Most kids during a barbecue play regular games like Frisbee or pretend school or tag or maybe even cops and robbers. That's not the case here. Kids here reenact what they see happening because that's life for them and they don't know anything different. They think this is normal but it shouldn't be. Kids should never feel like playing that game because it's what they see in any setting, but that's their reality. Reality needs a makeover.
We don't even really know why the guys started shooting. Was he angry, did he not like to see people enjoying themselves, did he hate barbecues, was he testing his new rifle, was the enemy just being a punk and wanting to stir something up while most people in the area we having fun? There doesn't seem to be any rational reason for someone to do that and I don't think many people in our neighborhood care. Someone if not most should care right??
7.29.2006
7.08.2006
Christians and Monopoly
A good idea or a recipe for disaster?
If anyone reading this is planning, at anytime in the near future, on playing a game of Monopoly with a group of friends. You may be in for a long long long long long game. I realized last night that when Christian's (or just good friends) play Monopoly unless they understand that the point is to not give someone a second chance that game could last a lot longer than it should. Andrea, Anthony and Javi (one of our friends here in Charlotte) and I all started to play and as the game progressed we were buying properties and making money and making deals and it was fun. Then we started building houses and hotels on those properties and people started to lose money and make money at the same time. Eventually some of us got to the point where we we couldn't pay the rent. That is the point of the game isn't it? to bankrupt the other players? We totally forgot about that and started to lend money and help each other out. We made deals and cut rent in half for each other and we said you can have immunity form rent this time, and it was good. We were enjoying it, until we looked at the clock and the time was 11:30 at nigh; we started playing at 7:00. We couldn't figure out why this game was taking so long, until I realized we were Christians playing a cut throat game in which you needed to be mean and deceiving and show no mercy. We weren't doing that. We were living out Acts 2:44-45 “All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need”. I said we're living out scripture in this game. Jesus sad if we have two coats we're supposed to give one to a person that doesn't have a coat. Javi looked at all his money and said, “bro, I got eight coats here”. So at about 11:45 we said okay no more mercy. If you can't pay we can't be helping each other out by handing out $500 bills like they're candy. You have to deal with bankruptcy, and we played until 1:30am. The game still hadn't ended. Only one of us had gone bankrupt (Javi). So we finally we had a genius idea. No one in the history of the world had thought of it before; it was brilliant. I couldn't believe how great of idea this was I'm getting excited just thinking about it. We decided to end the game, count up our money and assets and whoever had the most was the winner. Ba ha ha ha ha. I came in third. I only had half the money Andrea had and about $3,000 less than Anthony. The only person I beat was Javi and he was bankrupt. So learn from our mistakes. If your playing Monopoly with friends they can't be your friends for the next four hours (give or take nine hours).
If anyone reading this is planning, at anytime in the near future, on playing a game of Monopoly with a group of friends. You may be in for a long long long long long game. I realized last night that when Christian's (or just good friends) play Monopoly unless they understand that the point is to not give someone a second chance that game could last a lot longer than it should. Andrea, Anthony and Javi (one of our friends here in Charlotte) and I all started to play and as the game progressed we were buying properties and making money and making deals and it was fun. Then we started building houses and hotels on those properties and people started to lose money and make money at the same time. Eventually some of us got to the point where we we couldn't pay the rent. That is the point of the game isn't it? to bankrupt the other players? We totally forgot about that and started to lend money and help each other out. We made deals and cut rent in half for each other and we said you can have immunity form rent this time, and it was good. We were enjoying it, until we looked at the clock and the time was 11:30 at nigh; we started playing at 7:00. We couldn't figure out why this game was taking so long, until I realized we were Christians playing a cut throat game in which you needed to be mean and deceiving and show no mercy. We weren't doing that. We were living out Acts 2:44-45 “All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need”. I said we're living out scripture in this game. Jesus sad if we have two coats we're supposed to give one to a person that doesn't have a coat. Javi looked at all his money and said, “bro, I got eight coats here”. So at about 11:45 we said okay no more mercy. If you can't pay we can't be helping each other out by handing out $500 bills like they're candy. You have to deal with bankruptcy, and we played until 1:30am. The game still hadn't ended. Only one of us had gone bankrupt (Javi). So we finally we had a genius idea. No one in the history of the world had thought of it before; it was brilliant. I couldn't believe how great of idea this was I'm getting excited just thinking about it. We decided to end the game, count up our money and assets and whoever had the most was the winner. Ba ha ha ha ha. I came in third. I only had half the money Andrea had and about $3,000 less than Anthony. The only person I beat was Javi and he was bankrupt. So learn from our mistakes. If your playing Monopoly with friends they can't be your friends for the next four hours (give or take nine hours).
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