The Abyss

The problem with introspection is that it's impossible to have a balanced view of yourself. When I spend some ungodly amount of time focused on myself, I always end up thinking I'm either God's gift to the world in everything I do, or scum. Neither is true. I'm a saint and a sinner, an angel and a demon, a hero and a villain. Brennan Manning says he's an angel with an incredible capacity for beer. And he says it eloquently, too...and loudly.

It's a good thing there are other people in our lives - to tell us when we're being stupid and to invest in. It's better to get lost in someone else's life than to get lost in the vast abyss of yourself.

OCD?

Sometimes I think about how much we do because we are compelled. And I wonder how many things in a day we do because we have to, and how many things we do because we want to. Human beings have this pretty innate tendency to react negatively when they feel like they're cornered, or they feel like they are being forced into something.

I guess for that reason I'm glad that Jesus came because Jesus abolished the need for man to have religion to have peace. Because of Jesus, we can be free, and because of Jesus, we can just be. Enough doing, doing, doing. I need to be.

Predictability

My big problem with faith is that I want to know.

I want to know that I'm right about God - that when I do something that God is going to do something else in return. Really, I want God to be a giant computer. He would be a lot easier to pin down that way. He would be a lot easier to predict.

It sounds kind of funny, but doesn't it make more sense that God is unpredictable? Don't we want God to have a personality and choices, just like us? It's hard to have a relationship with a computer, no matter how long you stare at it, or how smart it seems to be. It's hard to have a relationship with God, too, but it gives me some comfort and intrigues me that God is personal, and not just a set of facts, or a set of rules.

2 Choices

The way I see it, I have about two choices. Either I can wait until everything in my life slows down to live my life the way I want to live it, or I can live my life the way I want now, in spite of my circumstances. My guess is that it's not going to die down anytime soon, so I better start figuring out how to be content despite the fact that my life is not exactly how I want it.

But would I really want a quiet life - one without difficulty, stress, or struggle? The beauty in life seems to come from a life lived through struggle, not absent of.

Doggone it!

It's easy to get caught up in the performance trap. It's a doozy, it's everywhere, and the only way to stay away from it is to realize that you're a failure and you'll always be. God's love doesn't really try to convince you that you're alright - that you're good enough and smart enough and people, at times, tolerate you. Jesus calls a spade a spade and that means we're all found guilty.

That's kind of nice for me to know, though, because then I stop trying to earn something that I can't earn. I can just accept that God loves me despite the fact that I am a failure.

Truth and my ultra-critical, abnormally large and thick skull

I find myself doubting what the Bible says quite often. Most of the time, it's when I don't read it. I figured out, though, that it's breathtakingly arrogant (a phrase I'll borrow from a good friend) to take potshots at the Bible and truth from my oft-critical high horse. Cause most of the time when I become skeptical, it's when I'm not consistently spending time with God, or reading or studying Scripture.

It's amazing, from outside the situation, it's easier to see how Christianity could be a real big crock. But when I spend time with God, it's not as easy. He seems very real. And I'm banking on the fact that he is - and that he loves me. I find myself loving Jesus, even though I'm not always sure (cerebrally) he's there.

It's like Fyodor Dostoevsky says, "If someone proved to me that Christ were outside the truth and it really were that the truth lay outside Christ, I would prefer to remain with Christ than with the truth."

Process

Today, I watched my two-year-old daughter with a bag of buttons she had gotten from her mother. She laughed as she dumped close to 100 buttons out on the dining room table and then proceeded to pick them up one-by-one, sometimes three-by-three, and slip them back into the bag. Then she would dump them out and start over.

You can learn a lot from a two-year-old, if you want. I was thinking that I could show her a more efficient way to pick the buttons up from off the table, by borrowing a pair of bigger hands to grab more buttons at a time, or by sweeping an even greater number of them off the table into the bag below, but I stopped myself because she was enjoying the process.

And I thought about how many times I just want to get something over with so that I can get on to the next thing, or so that I can stop worrying about getting it done, but life is more in the process than in the completion.

Believing and doing

I heard this guy say yesterday that believing always precedes doing and doing always follows believing. That means if you believe something, it's going to show up in your life. Now, we can argue about that all you want, but then we're just doing more of what people like you and I tend to do - talking about what we believe, rather than doing something about it.

One thing that a lot of us claim to believe is that God is love. It's in the Bible and it's basically common knowledge that God loves everyone, but how many of us actually live like God loves us? You almost have to set up a system of rewards and punishments to get people to read the Bible and pray, to spend time with someone who loves them dearly. That doesn't really make sense if you think about it.

If you think about, if we believe that God really is as loving as we say he is, it is a great thing to spend time with him. We gain something from it and he actually wants to be with us.