sometimes it just makes you stronger

Why do the right thing if you are only punished for doing so? I have to admit I'm still having trouble figuring out that one. I'm a very observant person. I tend to look into many situations pessimistically with some occasional optimism, but it's hard to when all you see is the good people around you constantly being punished. For example, when my mom died I remember my aunt saying that "The good ones always go first." When I heard this I took it personally, like God hated me just like Job thought about the LORD. Yes, it eased my pain a little to know that my mom was good and she didn't die because she had done something wrong in her life. But for the following 20 or so Sundays that I went to church I would refuse to bless myself, look at alter, or follow along during mass. When an event as strong as this one hits you, it makes you think. Well, I thought, and for a long time I questioned. What did I do to make her die? Is it my fault? I remember bargaining with God, maybe if I behaved she'd come back? Or maybe if I could exchange her for my beloved dog she'd come back? I just couldn't see what was wrong. I was in a fog. Nothing else existed except me and this problem.

Another instance is when I found out I had an overactive thyroid. I thought God was punishing me. I was in 4th grade. What could I have possibly done to make God give me such an illness? But, this made me think (more productively this time) that things don't always have to happen for a reason, and maybe I did misbehave when I was little and didn't want to go to Ukrainian school when all the other kids got to watch Saturday morning cartoons, but that doesn't necessarily mean its tied with my illness. In my opinion, they're not related, then and currently I think so because every event is separate on their own accord. Sometimes things just happen, and sometimes they make you stronger. But everything bad will always happen, and you can't stop it. You can only hope that God was just trying to show you something. And many of times he was. Well, at least he taught me a lot more than I think others have learned around me.

In the book of Job, I saw Job as a good, not upstanding, but a person who functioned the way he was supposed to. I don't know Job personally, but I feel as thought if the author had gone more in depth with the book of Job, maybe we'd all see that Job had a lesson to learn. Frankly, the reason I think the time in which the author wrote this was a time in which he was trying to prove that he had done nothing wrong or Job. Maybe if we all looked at our misfortunes, we'd see that there is something to be learned in the process or the aftermath. It's not because God hates us or that we are simply perfect and have done nothing wrong. It's because we're human and sometime we don't always look from the outside in. Job does a lot of complaining and maybe he could have sat and reflected. It's sort of like the song my Bob Marley, "Be Happy, Don't Worry". Whenever I'm having one of those days where I feel as though I'm being punished for nothing, I listen to it. Many of my punishments deal with social relationships and I feel as though God's trying to show me that if I just reached out a little further, there'd me someone there to grab my hand and tell me everything is going to be okay.

Nothing bad should happen to people, but they do. That's what society has told me. But sometimes I look at differently. I think everyone should be punished because we can be internally bad and externally to others very angelic. And when vise versa occurs its all okay too. We're human and sometimes it just makes you stronger. I can't emphasize it enough. A human race that we're all included in is made up of people and they're separate problems. If we all looked at our punishments as guidance we'd see that we're not always good.