Quick: Name the 7 dwarfs: Bashful, Doc, Dopey, Grumpy, Happy, Sleppy, Sneezy
Quick: Name the kids from Brady Bunch): Greg, Marsha, Peter, Jan, Bobby, Cindy
Quick: Name TMT's and the color of their colors: Leonardo(blue), Michelangelo(orange), Donatello(purple), Raphale(red)
Quick: Name the 10 Commandments of God:
Exodus 20: 2-17
I am the Lord thy God,
which have brought thee out
of the land of Egypt,
out of the house of bondage.
I am the Lord thy God,
which have brought thee out
of the land of Egypt,
out of the house of bondage.
2. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, ... Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them:
3. Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain; for the LORD will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.
4. Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work,..
5. Honor thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.
6. Thou shalt not kill.
7. Thou shalt not commit adultery.
8. Thou shalt not steal.
9. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.
10. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbors house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife,... nor any thing that is thy neighbor's."
New Year's Eve and New Year's Day myself, the Misfits, and 15 of our friends gathered at my house for a traditional New Year's Eve root beer party. This is actually a tradition my mom and I started when I was seven. Each year we brought in the new year together sitting at the kitchen table of our home in Sioux City, IA on Bushnell street, drinking root beer floats. It was a tradition I would carry to Boston MA with me when I left the home my father abused me in for seven years.
Last year I could not bring myself to enjoy this tradition, still in mourning from losing my mom to a massive stroke in November of 2011. The thought of celebrating a New Year without the love of my mom that started this tradition just did not feel right. I had a root beer float on the eve of the new year last year, but it did not feel the same as it would have had my mom been the one making them and sitting with me at the kitchen table, talking about all the fun the new year would bring us. I remember well how I sat there with that float in front of me thinking about the lives lost to me this New Year's Eve. I was missing my brother Joey, I was missing my neighbor Old Man Joe and his wife Mary, I was missing Widow G along with many others. I was missing my mom.
This past New Year's Eve I decided to crawl out of my grief of loved ones gone and go back to the tradition of making memories with family and friends that even upon their deaths someday, when I take my final breath on earth we will all be reunited for a life of eternal happiness. There may not be root beer floats in heaven, but there will be plenty memories that surrounded the ones I've shared with friends on earth.
My friends and I played many games New Year's Eve and New Year's Day as we consumed massive amounts of vanilla ice cream and bottles of root beer and food. It was one of the funnest gatherings of the year and not a drop of alcohol had been consumed. We strummed our guitars, we sang off key, we played poker with m&m's and we played a mean game of old fish. We played board games and card games and we made up games when we got bored with all the others.
We started a game of "Quick name all the .." It's a made up game where you divide up into teams and one side asks you an impossible question and the other team has 60 seconds to complete their list. The only reward offered in winning this game is the rights to brag about it. It seems that when my friends and I play this game, we play harder to win for nothing then the games were we are actually are rewarded a prize, like in m&m poker where when you win you get to add your winnings to your rootbeer float. The game was rolling along pretty well and between the two teams and we were head to head with providing all the right answers.
The game ended on a very inspiring and powerful note. The team I was on asked the question "Can you name the Ten Commandments provided to us by Moses through God to inspire us to live a life of balance with the diversity of people in the world?" Now, I know this question was asked with the intent on my team winning within the next 60 seconds. Bragging rights would be ours. The other team struggled severely with answering this question in the 60 seconds we allotted, so bad that we gave them an additional minute in their effort. When they failed to provide all the commandments it was my teams turn to recite them. We failed as well, even after given an additional minute to win it. It took 18 of us, both teams, 20 minutes combined to come up with the Ten Commandments we are supposed to live by to be better Christians. Sadly the ones most often remembered where the ones we had not broken. It was rather nspiring that 18 young men, most who probably have never been to a mass before, united together to come up with the answers to a question we should have known.
No one won that game on that day, but I feel we all won something. The memory of those twenty minutes spent with some of my very closest friends sharing a passion to come up with the list of the Ten Commandments will forever be etched in my mind. Watching my friends deep in thought on what could possibly be the best direction given for living life by God, gave me a chance to reflect on how truly good of friends I have. Hearing some of the things said in search of the right answers taught me that the hearts, minds, and souls of the people I have surrounded myself with are pure and genuine. I can, with a great amount of certainty, say that when we gather together again, this very topic will be brought up and it will not take us 20 minutes to list the commandments we live by on a daily basis, even though we never stop to think about what they are.
We might come closer to balancing the Budget if all of us lived closer to the Commandments and the Golden Rule. - Ronald Reagan
