Everyone Can’t Be in Your Front Row….

Life is a theatre – invite your audience carefully. Not everyone is holy enough and healthy enough to have a front row seat in our lives.

There are some people in your life that need to be loved from a distance. It’s amazing what you can accomplish when you let go, or at least minimize your time with draining, negative, incompatible, not-going-anywhere relationships, friendships, fellowships!

Observe the relationships around you. Pay attention to:

Which ones lift and which ones lean?
Which ones encourage and which ones discourage?
Which ones are on a path of growth up hill and which ones are going down hill?
When you leave certain people, do you feel better or feel worse?
Which ones always have drama or don’t really understand, know and appreciate you and the gift that lies within you?

The more you seek God and the things of God – the more You seek quality, the more you seek not just the hand of God, but the face of God, the more you seek things honorable — the more you seek growth, peace of mind, love and truth around you, the easier it will become for you to decide who gets to sit in the FRONT ROW and who should be moved to the balcony of your life.

You cannot change the people around you…but you can change the people you are around! Ask God for wisdom and discernment and choose wisely the people who sit in the front row of your life.

It’s no secret that I love UNC-Chapel Hill. Perhaps it’s because I’m a Chapel-Hill local, or maybe it’s because it’s my alma mater. It could be because of Michael Jordan, Raymond Felton, Mia Hamm, and Marion Jones. Whatever it is, there’s something special about it, and I love it.

Not to say that UNC doesn’t have its own set of issues. Construction on campus for the duration of my time there often made me yearn to see the place that they sold to me in the nicely printed brochures and admission packets I received. Sometimes I felt that the supposedly liberal zoo that I was at was swarming with institutional biases- racism, sexism, classism, etc. And I really begin to cringe when I think of the campaign season at UNC. Don’t get me wrong. I think that it’s great that students truly desire to make a change on their campus and to leave it better than they found it. It just gets to be so ugly, so personal, and so…just…ugh.

So, imagine my surprise when I discovered this article on CNN.com about Student Elections at Yale University. Now I know that in every presidential election since 1972 there has been an alumnus of this institution. But I have yet to understand why collegiate campaign violations at Yale constitute national news. I mean, maybe UNC hasn’t had someone in that political sphere like Yale, but we did have the 11th President of the United States James K. Polk (UNC Class of 1818) and Erskine Bowles, former Chief of Staff for President Clinton, and current President of the University of North Carolina System.

But, I digress. I suppose I’m just perplexed as to what makes student body/student government campaign violations at Yale more newsworthy than comparable violations at other institutions. Are they implying that, with the tradition of Yale alumni running for national office, that this is what we can expect for the future?

You tell me what you think. I’ll maintain that Carolina’s student body/student government races are a lot more intense than Yale. And we can still beat them at basketball.