There is always hope

It is the third week and I have gone to different events at my workplace. I went to a celebration party for Fred Wertheimer for his 50 years of service, an office party to wish good luck to one of the employees in law school, an interns’ social event, and a panel discussion with Nancy Pelosi, and others, about protecting the Mueller investigation. Unfortunately, through these events, and my daily life at work, I saw a lot of bureaucracy, and nepotism. It has made me sad and discouraged to see these phenomena within nonprofit organizations where they are supposedly trying to do things right such as seek justice for commoners and brake the corrupt system in politics. Not only that, but after talking to one of my peers, our talk brought up controversial topics of the social justice systems here in U.S.A. How many people pay attention when another country intervenes with the U.S.A system compared to the attention is being paid when U.S.A intervenes in another countries affairs. After the whole week, I felt pretty bummed out.

This past Thursday night, everything hit all at once. I needed some space and time to gather my thoughts, so I decided to go for a run. I ran from the Capitol to the Washington Monument. You can only imagine the relief and happiness I felt when I made it all the way there. On my way back, halfway there I could start to hear music coming from a big tent set up on the middle of the Capitol Mall. As I got closer, I realized that I was looking at a Poor’s People Campaign having live music and singing to be “set free”. The music and singing was free style, the people was dancing, the saxophone guy was killing it, and the energy was positive and exciting. I stood there in silence, observing, and wondering. That’s when the thought of hope crossed my mind: “there is always hope!” I decided to stay there until it was over.

On my way back, I decided to ride a bike, which ended I up being a bit more challenging because it was uphill and I don’t have as much conditioning as I thought. I had past another bicyclist but I had to stop because I was out of breath and thought about going up. I was going to walk uphill with the bike on my side when the bicyclist I had passed earlier, passes me and says in an encouraging voice “Come on! You can do it!”. Those simple words from the stranger were enough to give me energy and motivation to finish my ride on the bike which brought me back to “there is always hope!”

After all of that, I understood how the bible study of this week and the past week were connected.

Before, I can keep going I need to talk a little bit about the bible study of this week. From the chapters of Romans, Isiah, and Galatians, we talked about what type of freedom Jesus was talking about. How in today’s stature, when we think of freedom, we think of our individual freedom, but back in those times freedom was in relationships to one another. We talked about how God has set us free from the sin and now we are slaves of God, but not in the sense that he forces us to be, but in the sense that we live to serve Him. Not only that, but Jesus has called us serve one another. Where do you think the word serve comes from? From Old French “servir.” Or from Latin “servire,” which is derived from “servus” which means slave. This word has a lot of weight, and people do not like hearing “be slaves of one another” and that is why it is say “serve one another”.

After the bible study I was wondering what is it like to serve one another, and that night I thought it only meant through actions. But after my bike ride, I realized it also means through words: kind, encouraging, and love words. In English I would say the stranger words were useful, but in Spanish I will say “sus palabras me sirvieron” the last word comes from “servir” which is to serve. I hope I haven’t lost you in my thought process yet, because here comes the second part.

Last week on my blog I talked about family, and how different the world will be if we think of other people as our family before we make a decision. Treating other people like family could mean serving them as well, which as stated earlier doesn’t always mean in actions, but it can also be with words. Sometimes just encouraging one another can be what the other person needs. And who does not want to encourage its own family to do great things?

I have learned this week that the reality of the world can be harsh and organizations/people can disappoint you, but I am not going to give up on them because of that. We need to keep treating each other like family by giving our service to one another through actions and words. Remember this: words can be extremely powerful; all you have to do is say a few because “there is always hope!”

Raquel Resendiz

Blog Post 3

6/23/2018