As we celebrate NYE...

A very serious warning about the upcoming holiday.. please share this with everyone..NYE Dangers.

Santa Arrives at Teddy's

Merry Christmas to Our Family!

Here's a Very Special Merry Christmas to our Special Friends!

Ric, Joshhy, & William

From Joshhy...

I had to post this from Joshhy.... Joshua Harrison hey if any one wants to do anything nice for some one u don't know i am going to try to send a caple care packages out this week to solders overs seas if any one would like to add anything or donate anything let me know anything helps even if u want to do a letter who knows they may wright back lets make some one Christmas special they do so much for us this is the least we can do

Peace...

Just thoughts -- on interrupted peace.
by Jeni Stepanek, Ph.D.
On behalf of the Mattie J.T. Stepanek Foundation 

Peace is possible.

I do not understand why handfuls of people - those handfuls representing diverse races and religions and economic and education statuses - reach a point in life that a choice is made to destroy or diminish other lives in calculated or cold or careless ways.

I am at a loss for words and explanations right now. There are no good reasons or justifications for senseless acts of violence, or discrimination, or hatred, or revenge, or whatever. I do not know why some people, and I honestly believe it is 'handfuls of people' make the choices they make, because most people are, as Mattie said - 'generally and genuinely good'.

What I do know is that every moment in every life holds the opportunity for peace - not just as a possibility but as a reality. It comes down to personal choices.

Peace involves good judgment, not judging others.

Peace involves just choices, not choosing justice or revenge or retaliation for others.

Peace involves some level of personal sacrifice - in resources and time and mediation - not self-sacrifice or the sacrificing of others.

Peace involves education and communication and collaboration, not assumption or hearsay or force.

Peace involves understanding. Understanding our own needs that will enable us to survive, and that will also allow us to thrive and know hope and happiness.

Peace involves understanding our neighbors' needs and not assuming that all people have the same preferences or priorities in needs.

Peace involves balancing and tending to the needs of all people in a fair and just and good way.

Peace involves recognizing that the needs of humanity include not only access to food and water and safety and education, but also respect and hope and happiness and the nurturing of resiliency - so that natural burdens may strengthen us rather than harden us.

Peace necessitates a realization that mental and emotional health needs matter as much in the balance as physical and medical health needs.

Peace grows from a feeling that "we matter" and that we "have purpose" (or as Mattie called it, a "Heartsong") - despite differences or hardships or preferences.

Peace involves honesty and accuracy in story-telling and news reporting, not sensation or fact-angling.

Peace involves responding to realities in a balanced way, not reacting with emotion or political agendas.

Peace involves balancing privilege with responsibility.

Peace involves compassion and kindness, and patience and respect, and trust.

Peace is not about agreeing with or even liking our neighbors around the block or around the world; peace is simply about being with our neighbors - without judgment and with purpose. A good and gentle purpose, which is peace.

Peace is for all people, and peace is possible, if we learn and teach and understand what peace is really about.

Peace does not begin with ending wars or controlling or condemning or hating people we do not know or like or agree with or understand.

Peace begins within each of us when our needs are met, and we are enabled to make responsible choices in thought and attitude, and in word and action - in our homes, in our schools, in our places of work and worship, in our communities.

Peace grows as we support our neighbors in their needs, and in realizing that they matter and have purpose, even as we matter and have purpose.

Peace involves so many, many worthy basics, and truths.

Peace involves commitment to such basics and truths.

Peace involves role models, who exemplify all the necessary choices and truths that will create peace, despite natural burdens and differences and disasters.

Peace involves planning, and practice, and work. Hard work. Not just a commitment to ideals, but also negotiating and collaborating and creatively considering so many multi-faceted issues that interrupt peace.

Peace involves faith. Faith in Goodness, for this moment, and every next moment, and eternity.

We cannot always choose what happens to us, or to those we love and care for. But we can choose how we reflect any reality onto others, into the world, and unto the future. Peace involves a reflection anchored in hope, and nurtured by others, and strengthened with faith.

As we begin to recover from yet another tragedy, it becomes our choice in how to move "forthward" as Mattie would say - not pointing fingers, but joining hands and tending to those things that need to be fixed, and truths that need to be embraced, for our world. And I am certain that Mattie would encourage us to move forthward with a careful response that will support peace beyond the initial emotional reaction. He would say that hope is real, even in the darkest of moments, and that life is worthy of celebrating.

Mattie would remind us that peace is about fostering resilience and rebuilding the mosaic of humanity, and not about furthering revenge or retaliation. He would implore us to consider the truths of peace, and then to reconsider how we are balancing needs and rights and privileges with securities and responsibilities and protections. And I believe that my son would continue advocating that peace is possible and that it begins with a choice, but that peace also relies on reviewing and updating policies and laws and attitudes and habits that move peace from that ever-present possibility to a reality.

We must seek peace, and embrace peace as an attitude and something that matters in all times, not just when things are going our way.

We must make peace, and nurture it as a habit, and offer it to others through our words and actions.

We must bring peace, and share it with other people - people who look and live and think and pray much like us, and people who look and live and think and pray very differently from us.

We must choose peace as something that matters for ALL people, because peace IS possible, if we make peace our choice.

-These are just thoughts on interrupted peace, and on moving forthward, from "Mama Peace" - who has been crying with too many others in our good world in response to the latest tragedies.

Closing thought for this statement:

"We have, we are, a mosaic of gifts,

to nurture, to offer, to accept.

... and now, let us pray,

differently, yet together..."

    -Mattie J.T. Stepanek

"For Our World" poem excerpt in

 "Just Peace: A Message of Hope."

For more information about Mattie J.T. Stepanek or the mission and work of Mattie's Foundation, please visit www.MattieOnline.com. Thank you. 

Newtown CT. ....

True Spirit of Christmas....

With Christmas time and all of the other winter holidays approaching ... everyone seems to get more generous and sometimes we are looking for a place that really NEEDS your help.   There are millions of 'charities' out there. Some are real and do help but many are rip offs.  I have found 2 that are genuine and really help those who need it.  And... they are in your community.

The First and one of the most important but most frequently overlooked... are the  Shriners Hospitals.  This is a group of hospitals that cares for children around the country. Each hospital specializes in one area.  The local Shriners specializes in orthopedic care for children.  They provide all care necessary and don't charge for their services.  They will take insurances if you have them, but if not, your child is not refused care.

The Second and also over looked many times are the Ronald McDonald Houses.  These houses provide a place to stay for families who have brought their child to a hospital that is a distance from their homes.  Tampa has 8 of theses houses.



Both of these are real groups of people who help families and children that are in need of care.   If you really want to help someone that really needs it.. please consider one of both of these!!

War on Christmas??

reality vs commercialism 

Ah — I LOVE this time of the year!

Some people wait with bated breath for duck season, some for deer season, but for me it is all about Christmas season. That's right, I'm one of those lefty liberals that have declared a War on Christmas. Yes! Sign me up for the War on Christmas!

But maybe not for the reasons you might imagine.

While I am signing up to help in a War on Christmas, I'm not on, what by default gets called, the “non-Christian” side. I’m also not signing up for the side that news pundits falsely purport as the “Christian” side. If anything, I’d make the argument that the dominant face of Christianity, as it is seen on television and promoted through news programming, is itself far from what Christianity is supposed to be. It is a sort-of white-washed, sanitized version of Christianity that every year presents an increasingly cleaned up version of the Christmas story to the viewing public.  

You see, the baby we remember this time of year was not part of the dominant culture the way the religion he started now is. The religious stories that were told in those days were told under the shadow of the dominant culture. They were stories of oppression and hardships, stories of overcoming unthinkable odds, stories of hope for a people living in times and cultural positions that, quite frankly felt hopeless.  

But today, our stories are told from places and positions of power. Today, Christianity is the dominant culture. So, instead of story of a olive skinned middle-eastern, unwed, pregnant mother, who was seen as little more than property, giving birth to what the world would surely see as an illegitimate child who was wrapped in what rags they could find and placed in a smelly, flea-infested feeding trough in the midst of a dark musky smelling animal stall, we end up with a clean, white-skinned European woman giving birth to a glowing baby wrapped in impossibly white swaddling clothes and laid to rest in a manger that looks more like a crib than a trough in the midst of a barn that is more kept and clean than many of our houses.

So, “War on Christmas?” Sure, sign me up. I'm pretty sure I'd prefer the elimination of what our modern “celebration” has become to the increasingly white-washed version we hear every year.

The Christmas story has been hijacked by a dominant culture. Places of power and positions of prestige have warped the comeuppance sensibilities of the original Christmas story. God’s vision of liberating the oppressed, the downtrodden, has been slowly replaced year after year with a story that no longer brings fear to the Powers that Be, but rather supports the big business agendas of profit and mass consumerism.

“War On Christmas?” Come to think of it, they’re right. There is a “War On Christmas,” but the war is actually waged by many of the very people who think Christmas is getting squeezed out of our culture in the name of plurality and other religions. If the Christmas they support wins, I for one, would have to say all is lost.  So yes, there is a “War on Christmas,” and we Christians have been supporting it. If the present day, white-washed version of Christmas continues to be the dominant version, then I believe a great darkness will smother us in a sea of privilege and perverse oblivion to the struggle of those most in need — the oppressed, the downtrodden. 

If the Christmas Present with it's full-on worship of consumerism continues to masquerade as Christmas Past, our Christmas Futures will increasingly become times when we give out of our abundance rather than out of a response to need and out of a response to God’s love. They will be the kinds of Christmases in which we give to those who already have abundantly while the oppressed, the downtrodden, watch our overindulgence and rightfully judge us by actions which run contrary to our words of a child born to bring light into the dark corners of the world.

Isaiah 9:2 – “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness— on them light has shined.”  That should be the dominant message of the Christmas narrative. Is it? Does the way we celebrate Christmas bring light into the darkness? Does it bring hope to the hopeless? Does our modern-day Christmas celebration bring justice to those who have been treated unjustly? 

If your answer is “no” then, whether you knew it or not, you too believe that the Christmas Past has been white-washed by the Christmas Present.

During this season, as we remember not only the birth of the light of the world, a child sent to enlighten the darkness, we also remember his words: “No greater love has anyone than this, that they lay down their life for a friend.” As we remember the humble, unassuming way he came into this world, let us not forget that he left this world among thieves, as outsider hanging on a cross in an attempt to teach us something about God’s love.

A child born in a manger, no crib for his head, who was sent into this world to teach us something about the value of every human soul, sent in as the least-of-these, born to a poor woman in a borrowed animal stall, sent to teach us that “the least of these” is simply a human construct created by the insiders to define themselves over and against people they see as somehow less than themselves, sent to show us what a life looks like when it starts from the assumption that all people are worthy of God’s love.   

This Christmas I wish for you and for me is light in the darkness of the Christmas Present. I wish for us enlightenment from God. I wish for us an enlightenment that helps us see clearly the love for all people that laid in a manger some 2,000 years ago; an enlightenment that encourages us to be a light to those trapped in the darkness of hunger, homelessness, oppression, poverty and war. I wish for us an enlightenment that allows us to see we too have darkness in our lives, an enlightenment that helps us see beyond the cleaned up Christmas of the present to the humble, unassuming beginnings of our religion: a baby King, born to an outsider, born to save the world from darkness.

War on Christmas? A war on what Christmas has become? A war on worshiping consumerism in the sacred halls of Wal-Mart, Target, and Best Buy while the world is swallowed up in the darkness of not having enough food to eat, a place to live, clean water to drink, access to reasonable health care? Sign me up, because I refuse to let the story of my faith be co-opted by corporations who only wish to convince us that we are privileged and we do deserve what we have more than other and we should revel in our abundance even as we celebrate the birth of the child who laid in a feeding trough, who lived his life with no place to lay his head, who told us that “just as you do it unto the least of these so to you do it unto me, a child who gave up his very life that we might understand what true love looks like.

War on Christmas? Indeed. Where do I sign up?

From Rev. Mark Sandlin, of N.C.