During your life, you encounter many different forces that help you form your opinion and actions. Which factors contribute the most to shaping you up?
Put the following in your own order, and feel free to add some of your own: Yourself, your family, school/university/work, peers, spiritual, the media, religion, the government.
Edited: Smudge on 9th Jan, 2005 - 12:09am
Nice thread Smudge. First of all, the first source of shaping me up have been always spiritual sources....Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ as my first source, then my family (I was not raised with the conventional family so that's why I cannot say 'parents' but I can say my grandmother, my sister and my two uncles). Since I believe I still in the process of shaping, I have to say my actual family, my husband and my son. They are GREAT sources for it. Then my personal religious believes, I do not know if I can say the Church itself but what I have learn and the principles that I hold. Then the rest like school and work....
OK, I have edited church to say religion, parents and siblings to say family, and added spiritual sources.
Here is my order of things: Myself (or so I'd like to believe), my family (especially dad and sister), school, media and peers together as a secondary source. finally come government and religion which I'm not really into...
Like LDS, my spiritual life played a large part in how I was shaped growing up, and how I continue to be shaped. The Bible has given me my convictions on how to live, and I am very grateful for that.
Also, the support of my friends encouraging me to overcome the lousiness of what I had been given in life gave me the motivation to alway strive for the best in life. Anytime I have felt like quitting, they were always there to push me forward.
The trials I have endured play a large part in becoming who I am. Everytime I made a mistake, I learned from it. Having to overcome difficulties in life taught me to be strong, and it taught me to depend on myself and the ones around me to press on.
I try not to rely on the media to shape me because that is coming from a biased source. Even the most "honest" of media favor a side.