Changing My Community

By Allen Jorgenson

Grade 12

People ask me my opinion on how to change my community. People want to know what I feel are my responsibilities to make my community a better place. There are many different ways to go about doing this. I could build parks, benches, walking trails, organize groups to clean up the garbage and trash. I could build youth centers to give all the teenagers places to go and try to keep them out of trouble. I could schedule events that would bring the community closer together. That way everybody would know everybody else in the community (at least in mine, not in a really big community). Though that’s all nice and progress, I really feel like

people are missing the point on how to change a community. Even if I cleaned it up and built nice walkways, parks, swimming pools, and recreational centers for the people of my community to enjoy, all I’m really doing is just changing the outside appearance. What about the inside? What about all the broken families, all the abusive husbands, all the hurt and scared children? What about all the alcoholics, and drug users who drive on the same streets that your children and someday

my children will play in? What about all of the divorced families where scars have been left and children have been in the middle of all the fighting and arguing? Children who are forced to choose who they want to live with, having to go to court so the parents can battle it out over who gets custody of the children. Sometimes people just don’t realize how much they’re hurting their own children and what permanent effects they’re giving them.

People wonder why this generation is so corrupt and rebellious. I feel it’s because of the adults in our lives who didn’t discipline us and give us good morals and values to live by. All the problems they had as young adults, we’re getting, but only making them worse because what isn’t acceptable for one generation is acceptable in the next. Children are not meant to be raised by a single parent; it takes both, along with good discipline and guidelines to bring children up properly. I feel that if a community can attack the problems at the source, in time they can manage to get a good hold on the problems that plague our teenagers today, thus making our communities nicer and better places to live on the outside but also on the inside where I feel the biggest problems are.

Well reading this one might be thinking this a new concept, a new look at problems that are going on everyday. How on earth do we even began to change the problems and make it right? After some thought about this, it really reminded me of another problem similar to the one we face today in our homes and community. In the book of Jonah, Jonah tells his experience of how God worked in his life. There was this city called Nineveh that was very evil and corrupt. The city was full of wicked and sinful people so bad that God was on the verge of destroying it. God decided to give them one more chance. God told Jonah, “I want you to go to Nineveh and tell them that if they don’t repent of their wicked ways, I will destroy them.” Now Jonah despised the people ofNineveh, so he didn’t want to go. Everybody knows that Jonah tried to escape on a ship but was thrown overboard and swallowed by a huge fish. After three days he was vomited up on shore and started to head toward Nineveh. When he got there, he walked right into the middle of the city and began to say, “People of Nineveh, I am a prophet of God sent here to tell you that if you do not repent of your wicked ways, God is going to destroy your wicked city.” Well, through word of mouth, this finally got to the king. Now the king was very disturbed by all this and figured that their wicked ways better change, so he got on his knees before God and repented for his evil and made a decree that the people should follow in the king’s footsteps. Well, in short, the people were crying out for God’s forgiveness and there was a tremendous revival and the people were all spared.

The moral of the story is: that without God in our lives and in control, we are all messed up. Each generation is worse then the next because each generation pulls farther and farther away from God, and becomes more perverse than the next, causing more problems. I feel that we need to get our hearts and lives right with God before we will ever see a significant change in our family life, thus making our communities better.

There is so much crime, hate, murder, wickedness, and perversion in our communities today. When schools stopped allowing prayer, when they took away the ten commandments, when they said that teachers could not express their beliefs in God or Jesus, and when teachers were not even allowed to express their faith, I feel that is when all this happened; everything went down hill from there. School is where children learn how to act and where they get a lot of their values and morals. If we could just teach them the real truth from the start, I really think, in fact, I know it would make a great difference in our communities and homes across America. Just remember that school was started so people could learn to read the Bible. (How things have changed!)