A Quote by Jayni Chase
Money and stuff aren't what makes us happy. It's strong connections within families and friends, communities of people that truly care about one another.
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It makes me envious of anybody who can say truly that they don't care what anybody thinks of what they do, because I care a lot about the people who like my stuff.
Everything that truly makes us happy is quite simple: love, sex, and food! Everything else - power, influence, strength - all those things can overpower what's important in life. But as long as you have food and shelter over your head, if the necessities are taken care of, what makes us happy on top of that is very simple.
Part of what my work has always been about is to show that the apocalyptic character of the gospel makes the everyday possible. It gives us the time that lets us care for one another as we are ill, helps us care for one another as we experience broken relationships, and helps us take the time to worship God in a world of such violence.
The fact of the matter is, people care about their own human interests: the people they love, their families, and their communities.
You cannot be a party which takes money from Wall Street, which is not strong on the pharmaceutical industry, which is ripping us off every day, which is not strong on health care in taking on the insurance companies, which has not shown a desire to stand up and fight the economic establishment, and then tell working families that you are on their side. People see through that.
It is tempting to call for better leadership, but we probably expect too much from the leaders of the nations. Those nations are too big, the connections not strong enough, the commitment to the future not long enough. It is better to look smaller, to our now-smaller organisations, to local communities and cities, to families and clusters of friends, to small networks of portfolio people with time to give to something bigger than themselves. We have to fashion our own directions in our own places.
As businesses, as communities, as families, and friends, we need to go forward remembering that we're all connected in one way or another.
I think we're a little bit protective in that way. You're always trying to balance between what's spreading the word about the band and what's good money and what's a shitty look. Is this good for the longevity of the band? Do people even care these days? We care, but do we care more about the money? We've had a lot of discussions about things. It gets us into a lot of fights, but it also makes you question your own morals in a really good way.
I've worked with farmers in Zimbabwe who've lost their lands. I've worked with people in Venezuela, under threat of kidnappings, whose external world is unstable. But they have very strong social connections with their family and friends. And as a result, they're able to maintain a greater level of happiness and optimism than I've seen from bankers, consultants, or salespeople who are on the road all the time, who follow jobs separated from their families, and, as a result, find themselves missing out on the happiness that comes from those very connections that they severed.
If you think about the kind of people you want to have in this country, you want people who are hardworking, people who are ethical, people who look out for their families and their communities and people who are very physically strong.
Unless children have strong education and strong families and strong communities and decent housing, it's not enough to go sit in at a lunch counter.
You can't have a strong nation without strong values, and no one is born with strong values. They have to be taught to you in strong families and reinforced in you in strong communities.
If kids come to us from strong, healthy functioning families, it makes our job easier. If they do not come to us from strong, healthy, functioning families, it makes our job more important.
Sometimes the enormity of war overwhelms the truth that all great struggles are just the sum of individual stories. Each is more than just the story of one soldier's service and sacrifice. Their service ripples across their families, friends and their communities. Memorial Day reminds us it is the noble sacrifice of many that makes us who we are.
Joy makes us want to invest more deeply in the people around us. It makes us want to learn more about our communities. It makes us want to be able to find ways of being able to make this a better external world for all of us.
Kindness is the connection that links us all together and strengthens the bonds within our communities, neighborhoods, and families.
