Find the Right Balance! Part Two
May 15th, 2008
Set the right priorities in your life and become a more well-rounded person!
By Philip Nice
Herbert W. Armstrong College is all about helping young people find the right balance and live happily. Learning a well-rounded way of life is built in to the HWAC experience like a transmission is built in to a car. It’s all about being able to switch gears and change speeds, balancing academic studies with sports, speech, social activities, serving and a lot, lot more.
But you don’t have to be a HWAC student—or a mechanic—to learn balance in your life. In fact, I hope you don’t wait until high school graduation to start balancing your life and setting the right priorities. If you do, you’ll have missed out on years of success and happiness and fun!
You’re maturing, entering a life where you learn to make choices about what to do with your time—how to spend your life. In part one of this article, we—yes, me too—took a scrap piece of paper and jotted down our priorities for today and tomorrow. Now let’s think a little more about priorities. Let these guidelines help you add to, rearrange and change the notes you wrote based on these priorities.
Find the Right Balance! Part One
May 14th, 2008
Get a scrap piece of paper and a pen; it’s time to find a new balance!
By Philip Nice
Wow you’ve got a lot to do! School, homework, club, practice, chores, going to the mall, hanging out with your friends … so mmmuch! How are you going to get it all in?
But wait, that’s not even the half of it! You’re in God’s Church, so you’ve also got Bible study, prayer, Sabbath services, holy days, the Feast, camp, keeping in touch and hanging out with your Church friends. So mmmuch!
How do you find the right balance?
Well, first of all: Congratulations! You’re leading an active life! This is more significant than you might think. As a young person, it’s important to be active in a lot of different pursuits, because—be it history studies, clarinet lessons, volleyball practice, hiking club, washing the dishes, or biking with your friends—it’s all a part of your overall education and learning to be a well-rounded, balanced person.
Questions and Answers: Siblings
May 13th, 2008
Question: I am a 17-year-old male. My brother always argues with me and we can’t agree on anything. Sometimes we actually get in fights. He always wins. How can we get along without fighting?
The Incredible Human Potential, Part 2
May 12th, 2008
By Gerald Flurry
The baseball player Mickey Mantle was once a great star. Yet later in life he became very discouraged. An article in the Seattle Post Intelligencer, April 24, 1979, stated: “‘I can imagine a beautiful actress when she finally gets old, and nobody wants her,’ said Mickey Mantle, who is finding that his New York Yankee superstar days are hard to get out of his system. …
“‘You get so used to being pampered and applauded all your life, and all of a sudden you’re in your own living room watching somebody else get all that. Once you’ve had it it’s hard to forget. It’s tough to realize you’re through.’”
This was a man saying he was through. That glow was turning into darkness at a young age. And he had been a baseball superstar! “‘I don’t think anybody ever gets over it. I can see how it can kill somebody,’ Mantle said. The famed No. 7, three-time Most Valuable Player, won a Triple Crown and finished with 536 homers and 1509 RBI for 18 seasons. He was probably the most idolized player of the ’50s and the ’60s. … ‘I still dream almost every night that I’m trying to make a comeback. … I can see how a guy can commit suicide.’”
God has a tremendous goal for you. You can have a little fame and glory in this world for a short time, but it will fade quickly. God wants you to have a glow in your life that will last forever. It can last forever. In fact, it should last forever!
Movie Ratings R Not Your Mother
May 7th, 2008
Sex, violence, foul language, drug use, adult themes. It seems as though these are the ingredients in a moviemaker’s spice rack. The amount of such “spice” determines the movie’s rating: G, PG, R, etc. (It’s like an Oriental menu, where each meal gets more stars the more it will burn your mouth.) Seems pretty straightforward.
“It Was the Right Thing to Do”
May 6th, 2008
By Jason Cocomise
The term sportsmanship is practically out-of-date these days. In just the first two weeks of the 2008 NBA playoffs, there have already been multiple incidents involving on-court taunting and fighting, and off-court trash-talking.
Herbert W. Armstrong once wrote, “In interschool or intercollegiate competition, or the pro game, the attitude too often is bad” (Plain Truth, July/August 1984). This same attitude can often rub off on us, especially in a world with too few good examples.
But there are some rare examples of sportsmanship in this world worth emulating. One occurred just days ago, on Senior Day at Central Washington University, that can’t help but inspire you.
April 26 marked a key women’s softball matchup between conference rivals Central Washington University (CWU) and Western Oregon University (WOU). Senior Sara Tucholsky of WOU stepped up to the plate. In her entire softball career, including high school, she had never hit a home run. That was about to change.
Lesson of the Butterfly
May 5th, 2008
By Gary Rethford and Stephen Flurry
One day while out walking, a man happened to notice a cocoon attached to a branch which still held a struggling butterfly captive. In trying to break free of its encasement, the butterfly had chewed a small hole, in the end of the cocoon, but because its body was too large for the hole its struggles, so far, seemed fruitless.
The man felt sorry for the butterfly in its trial and suffering, and he thought, I’ll just help this butterfly. So he took his knife and made the hole in the cocoon larger. Sure enough, the butterfly soon emerged with little effort. Its body was swollen and its wings small and useless.
The man watched to see the insect dry out and take its first flight. But as time went on it never changed—that’s the way the butterfly remained for the rest of its unfulfilled life—swollen in body, with worthless wings.
That happened because it is in God’s design that the struggle of pushing its swollen body through a small hole forces fluids from the body into the veins of the wings. That fluid expands the wings and, after drying, allows them to attain their useful form and purpose for flight.
Much to his regret, the man had doomed the butterfly to a worthless life by removing its difficulty. It is only through hard work and determination that any butterfly attains the beauty and grace of flight. And without flight it cannot fulfill the purpose for which it was created.
Society is like that man. It encourages you to take the easy way out—to drift toward wherever you meet less resistance.
The Incredible Human Potential, Part 1
May 1st, 2008
By Gerald Flurry
The great novelist Joseph Conrad said that many young people begin life with a glow in their hearts, but that glow often expires long before they die. Why? Why do young people have so many of their dreams shattered? Why does life never seem to work out quite the way they expected it would?
Playwright William Shakespeare had a glow in his heart for quite a while. Herman Sinsheimer wrote of him: “There was not room enough for him in the island of Britain. He had to roam far and wide in order to keep his genius supplied with raw material. Like Drake and Raleigh, he discovered and held as booty the material which set his imagination on fire.” He’d travel around the world, and that would set his imagination on fire; then he would write about it. And nobody has ever equaled William Shakespeare as a poet, and perhaps nobody ever will.