Don't judge a girl by her T-shirt

“Whoever comes to me I will never drive away.” John 6:37

“Jesus straightened up and asked her, "Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?" "No one, sir," she said. "Then neither do I condemn you.” John 8:10-11

Yesterday I was talking to a friend on the bus. He complimented me on my outfit and we started talking about the differences in dressing styles between English and Romanians. On how Romanians love to look their best all the time and almost always will wear their best clothes in public whilst English are a lot more relaxed in their dressing style. He proceeded to tell me about this one time he went to Oradea (a city on the Romanian border with Hungary), and whilst on the tram he noticed a girl all done up, looking extremely serious and wearing a T-shirt which said “I am beautiful”.

My friend commented on how this girl was only trying to attract attention with her outward appearance. When I heard him, I got a bit flared up. I told him quite passionately that he has no way of knowing what was behind that made up face and the T-shirt with the bold logo.

I once read somewhere that Hurt wears Prada and Depression drives a Ferrari. Just because someone looks all put together and appear to have money does not mean that they have it all together.

A few years ago I worked as a volunteer in a Pro-Life clinic. We had a whole spectrum of ladies coming to the clinic, most of them just because they wanted to have a chat with someone. I learnt a good lesson whilst working there. Many of these ladies looked very elegant and put together when they walked through the door and sometimes I felt intimidated by them. That was until we would start to talk. In many instances it would be the elegant ladies, those who seemed to have it all figured out, that I would end up giving a hug to after they had a good cry. I learnt then not to judge by good looks the same way I know I should not judge beggars just because they look rough.

Looks mean nothing when your heart is broken and many times it is the best looks that hide the worst pain. People use looks like a mask. Some of them use elegance and expensive clothes to hide insecurity, pain and abuse.

And something else, just because a girl’s dressing style is “bold” does not mean that she is. Look behind the mask and I assure you more often than not you will find lack of self-esteem, pain and just a basic desire to be loved for who she is. Why do they dress like that? Because confidence is attractive, fear and pain are not. So, please don’t judge a girl by her T-shirt.

                                                                                       Emanuela

God is good all the time. Or is He?

These days, I seem to come across desperate souls everywhere I turn. Yesterday, they found the bodies of three Israeli kids who were kidnapped and shot by the terrorist organisation, Hamas. I prayed for days that they will return home safe. They never will...

A Romanian friend of mine, who is away from home, wrote on her Facebook wall yesterday “PLEASEEEE GOOODDD DON’T TAKE MY MUM!” She posted today that her mum is out of surgery and stable.

I went through a whole scale of human emotions yesterday varying from sadness and helplessness to anger and fury and culminating with confidence and faith. What you will read below is my muddy way of finding my own answers.

I ended up writing on my Facebook wall “I don't know why God chooses to answer some prayers and not others. I don't know why the mother of Gilad Shalit got to hold her son again and the mothers of these boys never will. But one thing I know, God does not stop being good just because this world is mad and evil”

We want to be independent and have the freedom to choose but we are not so willing to take responsibility for our choices. When things go wrong, we are not to be blamed, God is, because He is All Powerful and He should have stopped that. Pain and suffering pushes humans to unfairness and when we blame God, we are first and foremost unfair to Him.

But He is Almighty, right? So if He is Almighty than He is also to be blamed for everything.

I’ve seen people yesterday blaming God for what not and I got angry. Not because I never blamed God in my life for anything, quite the opposite, He was to blame for everything wrong in my life, including the fact that I was alive “since I haven’t asked to be born.” Yesterday, I got angry because I tried for one second to understand how I would feel if I got the blame for everything going wrong in this world.

 The mother of one of the boys killed, said two days before she found out her son was dead “God does not owe me anything.”  What a thing to say when you don’t know if your son is still alive and you pray with all your heart for him to be. Throughout these 18 days, the mothers of these boys taught me nothing else but dignity, faith, trust and what it means to know your God when disaster strikes. They were beautiful to me as only a trusting Jewish soul knows how to be.

God does not owe us anything at the best of times. He most certainly does not owe us anything if we decide to go our way and completely dismiss Him from our society. If He is not good enough to be followed He should not be the target practice for our blame game either. Luckily for us, He is not easily offended hence we’re still here.

Why am I writing all this? Because, I noticed a similar trend among Christians, whereby He is to be blamed rather than trusted. We pray and put all our faith in our prayer and then when things don’t happen, He is to be blamed. ”I mean I invested time and energy and faith and there’s no result, God. Where’s my answer?” I don’t know if this is the best question. Perhaps a better question would be-what is the point in getting an answer to whatever we ask for, if we miss the only thing that truly matters in our relationship with Him, and that is the confidence that "“the LORD is good and his love endures forever; his faithfulness continues through all generations.” Psalm 100:5