YOU SHALL SOON ACHIEVE PERFECTION

Thus read the very insistent (though false) contents of my fortune cookie tonight. I shall never achieve perfection; receive is a much better word. As a Christian, when Christ returns ("soon, and very soon," as the song says) I shall be made perfect. I look forward to that day.

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A friend asked me this afternoon what effect I think one of my long-term relationships has had on me. What a hard question to answer, in so many ways. Hard because listing all the ways this relationship has affected me would take a really long time. Hard because some of the effects are really difficult to explain. Hard because for questions like that anything less than the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth is a waste of time, and yet I like keeping what little I have of people's respect. Hard because some of the effects I have never discussed with anyone. Hard because while I understand a lot of it, I simply don't know the full answer. I stumbled through a semi-answer, and then settled on saying, "I know most of the effects, I just don't know what to do about it."

What do I do about it? That, to me, is the real question. Whatever effect my past and present relationships have had on me, and regardless how I learned my behaviors, habits and prejudices, the responsibility is mine, no one else's. Relationships are something I struggle with a lot (thus I think about them a lot and talk about them a lot). How do I unlearn the things I have learned? I am continually and repeatedly placed in the same kinds of situations in which I developed these habits in the first place, but now with my self-preserving negative recourses denied me (by myself, with great regret) and no obvious and appropriate solution, what am I to learn to replace them with?

I can trust God for a great many things, and I can give to him a great many things with ease. I consciously choose to trust that things are as God intends them to be for now, even the painful things – how could I believe otherwise? But here is why this particular thing scares me so much: God may not intend for this to go away. The idea of struggling like this for years or the rest of my life is unbelievably hard for me. On the other hand, in spite of anything, I cannot deny this: God's way is Right.

Psalm 145:17, 21
The Lord is righteous in all his ways,
and loving toward all he has made.

My mouth will speak in praise of the Lord.
Let every creature praise his holy name
for ever and ever.

Relient K

Yes, my favorite Christmas song ever was written by a punk band...

"I Celebrate The Day"

And with this Christmas wish is missed
The point I could convey
If only I could find the words to say
to let You know how much You've touched my life
Because here is where You're finding me,
in the exact same place as New Year's eve
And from a lack of my persistency
We're less than half as close as I want to be

And the first time that You opened Your eyes
did You realize that You would be my Savior
And the first breath that left Your lips
Did You know that it would change this world forever

And so this Christmas I'll compare
the things I felt in prior years
To what this midnight made so clear
That You have come to meet me here

To look back and think that
This baby would one day save me
In the hope that what You did
That you were born so I might live
To look back and think that
This baby would one day save me

And I, I celebrate the day
That You were born to die
So I could one day
pray for You to save my life.

Gospel

"To be the recipient
of an unrecognized treasure
at a cost far less than its worth —
I value it all the more for its being undeserved"

It strikes me that of the gifts I have received, the ones I value most highly would be considered of little worth by most of the world, and the greatest victories in my life have not resulted from any effort of mine.

The Genius of Fox News

Spoken by a reporter standing in front of a smoldering field near a wildfire in California:

"As you can see, the field behind me is covered in smoldering ash, and this ash is going to continue to smoke for a period of time."

I assume their fire experts came up with that one after spending "a period of time" investigating.