Dante Optimism

Optimistic News: Bullying Rates Are Dropping

From the awesome team at Good News Network. Bullying has gone down for grade students. There are three main stats to pull from this:

  • Bullying rates were as high as 29% but steadily dropped until it fell below 10%
  • 1%-2% drop in students doing the bullying themselves
  • 23% fewer students witnessed bullying while at school

All across the board, this is nice to see. I was bullied when I was in school. I simply took matters into my own hands to…”eliminate” the problem. Ahem. But, sure, it’s good to see the efforts from schools to better manage what was a growing problem are working out. So, the next time you hear about another bully incident, just remember, overall, it’s not that bad.

Make sure you sign up for the newsletter!

Dante’s Optimism is launching a monthly newsletter starting June 1st (and it goes first of each month). If you haven’t already, you should go ahead and sign up. I’ll be posting reminders during the next couple of weeks. Visit my page dedicated to explaining what it’s about as well as how to sign up. It’s a simple process.

The June newsletter is essentially done. I’m just waiting for June to roll around while making some tweaks. I plan on the appearance of the newsletter to remain the same (set up a template and just use it over and over). Currently, I’m playing around with the look to see what can be improved and what should be taken away.

Again, the newsletter and blog will each contain exclusive content you wouldn’t see in the other place. So, I mean, it would add to your experience if you sign up, but, you don’t HAVE to. It’ll always be free. If I want to charge people for a newsletter, it’ll be a different one, so don’t worry about something randomly happening…I don’t even think I could…eh, whatever.

I’m also considering producing a humor based newsletter, but let’s see how this one does.

Thanks for the support, kittens!

Tuesday Testimony: Casting Out Evil Spirits

This testimony is from Testimony Share.

It was a Tuesday, the 14th of February, 2016. Valentine’s Day. Began as a normal day nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Little did I know that this would be among the most significant days in my spiritual life? For a long time I had prayed and asked God to reveal Himself and His mighty power to me. I had read amazing stories in the bible about how God had manifested His great unlimited abilities to various people. Most of my friends also kept telling me that they had experienced this and that made me desperate. I wanted to experience something for myself and the day had finally come.

At about 3pm, I received a call from Albert a friend who was moving to a new house and needed help in packing his stuff and just the whole process. A few minutes later Albert got to where I was and we left together to start packing. As we descended the stairs in my apartment we met Steve who strangely seemed surprised to see us. Not sure what startled him because he had met both Albert and I before so I couldn’t put a finger on what made him react in such a way. Quickly we pushed this thought out of our heads and went our way.

On the way to Albert’s new place we met Steve again who walked directly towards me and told me that he had come looking for me at my place and hadn’t found me. He was acting very strange. Normally he would just be by himself alone in his room. Steve is a very quiet private guy who would hardly be found with people or even outside his room just sitting by himself. At that time he was sitting in the view of everyone just outside our apartment. He liked to smoke and that’s what he was doing strangely in front of every person who cared to look.

Oddly he seemed to be running away from something unseen because he would suddenly pace up and down look around as if being watched then sit in the view of everyone not disturbed by the attention he was getting from around. I guess that’s why he had run away from his room.

When I got back to the house, I decided to play classical music since I had about an hour to kill before the evening’s bible study. Quickly went through my favorite artists Savage Garden, Phil Collins, Michael Bolton and the likes selecting a few songs adding them to my playlist. I wasn’t keen enough to notice this song by Bridgit Mendler “Ready or Not” sneak into my playlist and it kept playing in my head. The chorus goes something like:

Ready or not
Here I come
Where you at?
The night is young
in the crowd the music’s loud but I will find you
ready or not

It was almost like a message. Something was trying to get to me through this song. It’s like it was saying that whether I’m ready or not it’s coming and it will find me. I didn’t realize that then.

During the bible study, we were sharing about how we had been doing on our CBR, continuous bible reading and I told my friends that for me CBR had begun well till I got to the book of Leviticus and found it a bit boring. So I skipped it jumping to interesting stories like David’s and the like. I felt challenged like the Lord was trying to tell me that I needed to read the whole bible so that I’m better equipped to handle “WHATEVER WAS TO COME”. These warnings kept coming to me but I guess I wasn’t ready to see them as such.

That night at about midnight Steve started screaming and crying in his room. He kept shouting things like ‘Oh my God. They have found me. They are going to kill me and things like that. My first thought was not to come out of my room. I was really tired so I felt like just praying and letting God do the rest but the shouting didn’t stop. It was so loud I couldn’t sleep. I decided to make a short prayer and went to his room.

Most of my neighbors were up but were too terrified to leave their houses. I felt like it was a spiritual attack and had to do something. I quickly found out that I was the only Christian and that terrified me. I made a prayer to God. The story of Esther from the bible came to me and how she had asked people to pray for her and fast before she faced the king and if she were to perish then she would let it be. So I told myself the same thing. Told God that I felt terrified and weak and so unequipped for whatever I needed to do but I couldn’t just sit around and watch my friend suffer. Plus I needed to sleep.

With my terrified little steps I went to his room and Steve looked terrible. He was sweating and crying and pointing towards a corner of his house crying and saying that they are there to kill him. I looked around but couldn’t see anything. I almost began to think that he had lost his brain when the worst happened. I HEARD A VOICE. It was so clear and came form that corner he kept pointing towards. It was a female voice and it seemed like she was laughing. I couldn’t see anything but heard the voice. That shook me to my core. Whatever little courage and strength I had got just flew out through window.

I lost all strength and went on my knees started crying to God. I told Him begging that if His response was contingent to how much faith I had or how righteous I had lived then we would all perish. Whatever Steve was seeing existed and it was real I just couldn’t see it but I almost felt its presence in that room. As I kept praying I began to feel some warmth in my heart. It was like we were surrounded with some protection circle. I couldn’t see it but I felt it. Steve initially kept saying that he was seeing eyes all over but with time all that stopped. God had answered my prayer.

As I got to my house at about 3 am I took a moment to pray to God thanking Him for all that he had done that night. I had seen His hand and felt it. He can come alive to you too if you believe and ask Him to show himself to you. I pray that as you have read this, the Lord reveal Himself to you so that you join the many witnesses of His great and marvelous works. I’ll leave my email in case you have questions or an experience you’d like to share or anything. God bless.

fredrickmangula at gmail dot com
Fred

Optimistic News: Doctor Feeds Hundreds of Elderly People

I caught this from Sunny Skyz.

So, there’s this doctor who has been feeding 500 elderly people for the past 10 years. He doesn’t charge anything. Here’s a snippet of how it started:

“One of my patients was an old fellow, he must have been around 78. He showed up at my door, all helpless. He wife was chronically ill and couldn’t do anything on her own. This couple was old, poor without even 10 rupees to buy a vada pao. He said he needed food, it moved me and that is when I decided that I want to feed the needy elderly for nothing in return”
His name is Uday Modi, and he does accept donations to help fund his operation, which he calls “Sharavan Tiffin Service”. I like to think maybe one day he’ll be able to expand and help feed other hungry people. But, ya know what? I love his future plans for his service and I really hope it comes forth.

Optimistic News: Family Saved from Drowning

Boy, this was an interesting story from the excellent site “Good News Network“.

What we have is a video of a bunch of men trying to save a father, and his toddler and infant children from drowning as their SUV was trapped in rushing water…upside down.

The man who recorded the events ended up performing CPR on the children.

I get really excited about stories like this for one particular reason (among other reasons): Video. I find it sad we are able to capture video for tragedy seemingly easy. But, what about heroics? I’m glad Tom decided to pull out the camera. Hit the link and watch the video.

No, seriously, watch the video. A very powerful video indeed. You don’t need to know how long it is. But, if you HAVE to know, I would guess it was a few minutes long. I mean, the video player doesn’t have a timer on it so…but whatever. Like I said, it doesn’t matter. The whole thing was pretty awesome. You saw this happened. You heard the fear and eventual sighs of relief.

As I said before, I’m happy this was recorded. So happy.

Why is this blog named Dante’s Optimism?

Whenever I name something, it’s because the name or word means something. For example, a nickname for one of my sisters is of a breed of dog. I saw the personality and traits of this dog and my sister came to mind. Add in the fact that she loves animals, and it was a perfect fit.

I mean…there is a risk here. Clearly, we know a female dog is a bitch, but, ya know…I would never call her that…

But anyway, when I was looking for a new name for this blog, I wanted something that reflected what this blog was about. So, I got my thesaurus out and went hunting. “Positive” “Good” “Hope” and other words were considered. And then, I ran into “Optimism”.

Being optimistic is tough in today’s world. But, I think every generation says that, honestly. But, when we think of that word, what does it mean? Optimism:

  1. 1 : A doctrine that this world is the best possible world

  2. 2 : An inclination to put the most favorable construction upon actions and events or to anticipate the best possible outcome

Alright. So, when I say “Dante’s Optimism”, that’s what I’m talking about. I didn’t pick this name because it sounded fancy or sophisticated. I didn’t pick this because other people were using this word and I wanted to get on the bandwagon. No, I knew what I wanted for this blog, and optimism fit the bill perfectly.

It’s my optimism, though. This is how I feel. So, I put my name on it. This is what optimism looks like to me. In the near future, I will be making under the hood changes to the blog to promote this. When I’m done with Daily Good Stuff, I’ll be moving on to another type of featured post that will really dive into this optimistic goal.

Be optimistic.