Sound like a good story to you? It was a good enough story that I’ve remembered it all these years, ever since I first heard it in Sunday school twenty or so years ago. The moral that the Sunday School teacher was striving to make was clear: friendship with the world is enmity against God. The things that look so good and promising in the world more often than not end up leading us astray, while the path to blessing and a life that pleases the Lord is often through desert and hardship. Good job, Sunday School teacher, on a memorable lesson and a neat little moral.

This doesn’t seem like a problem until you actually read Genesis 13, and discover that there’s no desert anywhere in this little tale.  Which seems, I suppose, like a really small thing until you consider what a far-reaching influence that particular Sunday School lesson had on my conception of the spiritual life.

I’ve always been a pretty simplistic thinker at heart, the sort of person who feels the most comfortable in a world of childish, black-and-white absolutes. This particular story reinforced that tendency and led me to consider life a perennial choice between two options:

a)      The one that looks really good and that you really want, but will bring devastation in the end.

b)      The one that looks pretty bad and bland and boring from a human standpoint, but which will bring us closer to the Lord in the end.

The fruitful land vs. the desert. And I’ve spent so much of my life choosing the desert, being afraid of anything that I wanted that looked nice and promised pleasure… fearing that which promised to be a nice cup of tea or a funny television show or a growing relationship was only a trap that would, in the end, lure me away from God. I loved God and didn’t want to displease Him, so I tried to do the thing that my Sunday School teachers told me to do: I fasted, and abstained, and broke relationships. All because I thought it was the right, the spiritual thing to do – because I was terrified of being Lot, because I so desperately wanted to be Abram and to be close to Him who my soul loved.

And it was bewildering to me, how a God who wooed me with beauty would then tell me to turn my back on it as soon as I became His – but I tried, because I thought it was right. I had chosen God, therefore, I had chosen the desert. And if I wasn’t content in it – well, that just meant that God wasn’t enough for me, didn’t it?

But this story, the real story recorded in Genesis 13 – there’s no desert anywhere in it, no neat little moral that comes out of it at all. Abram and Lot decided that it would be better for them both if they parted ways, and they did so. Was Lot wise it pitching his tents so close to Sodom? Of course not. Would he have pitched his tents so close if he hadn’t have been swayed by the good land around that wicked city? Probably not. But there’s absolutely no indication from the text that this was some sort of spiritual test to be passed or failed, or even that Lot’s unwise choice left Abram with the short end of the stick. In fact, later chapters seem to imply that Abram was doing pretty well. And the LORD gave him the land as a blessing, and I don’t think that the LORD is in the habit of giving crappy blessings, so it must have been pretty good land itself.

Could it just be possible that I could both love God and enjoy the world He created, as well?

I’m not trying to blame twenty-eight years of neurosis entirely on one Sunday school teacher whose name and face I can’t even recall… there were others too, haha. Like the Sunday school teacher who decided it would be an amazing idea to do a lesson on the devil and Daniel Webster… do you know for how many years I was afterward terrified about the prospect of selling my soul to the devil? Or the Sunday school teacher who told a long, emotional story about poor heathen children who were so sad… until they came to know Jesus, died shortly thereafter, and were happy for the rest of eternity. Which my five year old brain translated as… if I know Jesus, then I’m going to die. Um, thanks teacher! Or, speaking of death, there was the guy who told a room full of thirteen year olds that it was just plain statistics that at least one of us were going to die before we reached the age of twenty. Of course, in my heart of hearts, I knew that was going to be me. (I’m still shocked that it didn’t happen.)

The point of all this is: words are important and shaping. Especially words spoken to children. And extra-especially words that are spoken with spiritual authority. So be careful about your words. Don’t speak things that aren’t given to you to say. Use a little common sense in what you share. Think through the implications of what you’re saying. Don’t add stuff to the Bible, even if you think it makes for a better moral with your additions.

There’s a sentiment floating around that it doesn’t matter what quality a job you do, as long as you do it with a good heart. To which I say – pah! God gave you a brain for a reason, use it. Use your brain with a good heart behind it. After all, He is the One who promises to call us to account for every careless word that we speak.

Not TC - just a cute kitten I found on the internet. Photo by Mathias Erhart.

I thought about TC this morning when I opened my Bible and the first verse my eye landed on was Deuteronomy 33:13 – “About Benjamin he said: ‘Let the beloved of the LORD rest secure in Him, for He shields him all day long, and the one the LORD loves rests between His shoulders.’” A friend gave me this verse last year and it has been a source of encouragement since, especially with the comforting connotations of TC sleeping between my shoulders as a kitten.

TC didn’t do that for very long. (Which I suppose was a good thing, because later in life he got very fat.) I missed it, but the one thing I learned very quickly was that lying face-down on one’s stomach is not the best position for forcing anyone to do anything – I couldn’t grab TC and make him sleep there. The choice was entirely up to him.

How strange is it that neither does God force us to rest in Him, but always leaves the choice up to us. That the almighty creator of the universe in this regard maintains a position of vulnerability – for when the tension is between being loved and being rejected, vulnerability is inescapable. To say nothing of tremendously difficult, this continually offering yourself in love to someone who has been given the ability to reject you. And yet that is the posture that God takes with us. Not forcing us, but waiting, waiting for us to make the choice of our own volition.

When we see this great and humble love on our behalf, it stirs our hearts to make free will choices that speak love instead of rejection. The problem is that it also often stirs up our resolves and determination to love Him out of our own strength. And so we often respond to His call to love Him with with a list of external things that we have determined to do to prove that we have truly heeded the call. We tell ourselves that we will: 1) pray a certain amount of hours every day, 2) read a certain amount of the Bible or Christian books every day, 3) speak this much about the Lord in our conversations, 4) devote this much time to church activities, 5) speak in this tongue and have this emotional experience and feel this certain way in our times of worship, 6) give this much money.

I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t sound like rest to me. That sounds pretty exhausting.

There are a lot of dangers, too, in this way of thinking. For one, it cheapens the grace of God by playing with the idea that all we have to do is ‘so much of this’ and ‘so much of that’ in order for God to be satisfied with us and our ‘duty’ to Him fulfilled. But how silly of us to think for one moment that anything a feeble, sin-stained mortal can do can make them acceptable in the sight of a transcendent, holy God. We have been made right in His sight only through the sacrificial death of Jesus. Our only acceptable work is belief (John 6:19); our response, then, becomes to rest (Hebrews 4:9-11). 

So good!!

Secondly, it compartmentalizes our lives to their own ruin. God doesn’t want only the spiritual parts of us – He wants every single bit of us. Leave it to me to bring anime into such a discussion, but I think that this (for those of you who live in America; this, for those of you who live elsewhere*) has to be one of the strongest portrayals of what the gospel is all about that I’ve ever seen.

Have you read/watched it? Isn’t it wonderful? I love it. I love how Tohru so unconditionally loves and accepts Kyo, and how she desires simply to be with him and to know him, even in his ugliness. God doesn’t want just the tiny sliver of our lives that we deem spiritual and acceptable to Him, because as Isaiah wrote, after all, “all our righteous acts are like filthy rags” (Isaiah 64:6). He takes us as we are, all of our ugly bits included, and loves us completely and unconditionally as we are. Our free will choice becomes, then, not to do certain things for Him, but to rest in this never-failing, all-consuming love that He has for us. From that point comes transformation – from the inside out.

* If you like the manga and want to read more, please consider purchasing a copy if it’s available in your area! It’s a pretty easy manga to find in America, I don’t know about other countries.

About this time last year, I went on a day trip to the beach with a couple of friends. It was a pretty difficult period of my life, and I remember taking a taxi back home that night with a friend who was also going through a pretty rough patch. A lot of things I said to that friend that night weren’t very helpful and I wish hadn’t been said. But one thing I remember clearly, so clearly, is sitting in the back seat of that taxi and silence falling over us and suddenly, inexplicably, being washed over by a sense of purpose and beauty. It was if, for that brief moment, God had pulled back the curtain of temporary pain and given me the tiniest glimpse into the big picture. And it was beautiful.

And then, just as quickly as it had come, it was gone, and life continued. Some of the things that happened next were pretty hard. Life seemed, for a good while, anything but beautiful.

A few weeks later I got together with some friends to pray for the new year, and I remember someone asking me what my particular prayer for 2011 was. Unhesitatingly, I replied that my desire for 2011 was to be nearer to God at the end of it than the beginning of it. And, on some level, that was what I truly desired. But also there was, in a not very deep and not very hidden part of me, some attempted manipulation in my request: perhaps, I reasoned, if I pleased God by asking only for a deeper relationship with Him, then He would also be pleased to grant good ends (read: my good ends) to the painful situations that I was at the time facing.

Well, here I am at the end of 2011. And those things that were hurting my heart so much at the end of 2010? They’re still there. In a little bit different shape then I saw them back then; certainly they’re not exactly the same. But although the hurt is not the same, it’s still there. God didn’t work those situations out with my neat little solutions: He paid no attention to my proposed Plan A, or even my Plan B or C. He paid no attention to any plan of mine at all.

What God did do was remain faithful to His plan – the beautiful plan that He for a moment let me taste in the backseat of that taxi. I’m still not sure what the final picture will look like, or how every little subplot will eventually fall into place. But He’s once again brought me to a place where I am willing to trust the means to Him.

He did this by breaking my heart, over and over again; by closing off every single door that led me to comforts other than Him. He did this, not by bringing resolution to the surface issues that consumed my attention, but by reaching deep in to the inmost dark places and beginning to heal me on an altogether different level, in ways and places I utterly did not expect. And He did this, in His mercy, by sometimes providing times of unspeakable beauty and refreshment – so that a year that has held some of my darkest moments has also held some of my loveliest ones.

The temptation in all of this is look back over the year and say, look at how far I’ve come. But that’s utterly ridiculous, because this is all about what God did, not me. Most of the time I was a kicking, screaming, whining non-participant in the (yet uncompleted) process. And yet God, for some unfathomable reason, chose to remain faithful to this little bit of dust and to answer my prayers over and beyond my imagination. I was begging Him for little baubles and temporary comforts – and He was giving me Himself.

This is an altar of remembrance.

For two weeks, I took care of dogs and did my own cooking – which was fun, because I’ve always been spoiled by having roommates who would cook for me or by living in countries where I ate out every night. I also watched a lot of TV, which was also surprisingly fun. My favorite was when I had to get up early in the morning to feed the dogs, and there was nothing on but random documentaries on PBS World… I’m now an official expert on string theory, the Trail of Tears, and ferrets (among other things.)

I read a lot and wrote surprisingly little. Big surprise to anyone who knows me, I also did a lot a lot a lot of thinking.

This is my brain on writing.

I began to wonder if I use writing as a shield, sometimes. Ideas come into my mind and the next minute I’m writing them down, sharing them on this blog, or telling them to someone else. It’s like writing has become the means that I use for  “idea-proofing” my brain from actually absorbing any idea that I encounter throughout the course the day. Write it down, get it out, forget about it.

There are probably plenty of reasons for this. Thinking about things has always been the easy part; actually putting good thoughts into practice is a great deal harder. And the thing about writing is that, by the act of writing, it sort of makes it look like you are putting those things into practice. But in reality all you’re doing is telling other people about the things that you’re too lazy to do yourself.

Another, I think, has something to do with our millennial culture. Don’t get me wrong, I think there are fantastic things about the world today. I really enjoy living in a world where I can get a phone call from Eastern Europe in the morning, read my Thai friends’ facebook updates in the afternoon, and do some business in New York in the evening, all without leaving my house. And it’s cool to think that there’s no place on the globe that is not more than a day’s travel away. So, yeah, there’s a lot of great things about this 2011 thing.

But at the same time, our culture does tremendously value egocentric output. The internet and social media are a symptom of this, and not the disease in themselves. Long before the advent of facebook, I remember looking at pictures of movie stars in tabloids at the grocery store… so-and-so going grocery shopping, so-and-so’s latest relationship entanglement. We’d read magazines and newspaper articles and watch television programs entirely devoted to treating every little thing in so-and-so’s life as if it were of tremendous significance and importance. Where are they shopping? Do they prefer to eat their french fries or their hamburgers first? I remember taking all this in and thinking, wow, someday I want people to think that I’m as important as all that, and to be interested in me.

And then came social media, and we all get the illusion of being mini-celebrities, posting our pictures and our whereabouts and our most clever thoughts in 140 characters or less. No wonder we all thought it was fun, having been trained for some many years that this was what being important and valuable looked like.

Honestly, I want to be seen and I want to be known. My greatest fear is going through life alone, without a witness to it. I want someone there to see me when I’m happy, or I’m sad, or I’m just plain ridiculous. I want to be acknowledged, and thought important, and valuable… just for being me. And I want to be a witness to others. I think that’s, at the end of the day, a major part of what love is. A commitment to witness the life of another, the good and the bad and the ugly, and to remain.

Imagine this so full of water that the water has no place else to go, but out.

That’s a pretty deep longing, and one that facebook can’t begin to meet. The danger comes in that it gives us the illusion of fulfilling it. We post our pictures, and our whereabouts, and our pithy status updates, imagining that because we do so, we are known. But are we?

So I’ve been wondering what would happen if I took more time to soak. Instead of my automatic response to an idea being to want to share it online, what if I just stopped and embraced the silence as an opportunity to get to know that thought better? What if I became less desperate about wanting to be known by others, and took more care in knowing myself? What if I became unafraid of being thought unimportant, of being forgotten, of not being seen? What if I waited?

I have a feeling that, eventually, that would also result in more writing. But it wouldn’t be writing like a bit of water rolling off of a water-proof surface, it would be writing like sponge, flowing out of me only because I’m so saturated with the ideas themselves that there’s no other place for them to go.

Am I ready to try this?

So, last night I watched the final two installments of the Harry Potter movies. I just finished the seventh book this summer, so it was still pretty fresh in my mind. And, for the most part… wow! I’m usually not that excited about the results of books being turned into movies (just thinking of those dreadful new Narnia movies makes me cringe), but I have to say I was very pleased with this last movie. In parts, I thought it was even better that the book, although of course there were parts of the books that I preferred over the movie, as well.

For example. One of the things that most bothered me about the book, after I finished reading it, was the apparent non-issue Harry had with the fact that he had taken to throwing around unforgivable curses left and right. I was disappointed in Harry when he first cast the Imperius curse in the bank but was thinking… well… there’s still a lot of time to go yet and he’ll probably come around to the error of his ways. But he never did, and continues to do it… and then McGonagall joins in and starts throwing the Crucio curse around. I know it seems pretty small but, man, thinking that the ends justify the means is the sort of thing that bad guys do. It was really disappointing to me that casting unforgivable curses in a pinch seemed to be condoned by necessity, and that there was never even any discussion as to the possible moral ramifications of such an action.

I understand that this blurring between “good” and “bad” is a major theme in the novels. Sirius Black states it well in The Order of the Phoenix: “…the world isn’t split into good people and Death Eaters. We’ve all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on. That’s who we really are.” No one in Harry’s world (or in the real world, for that matter) is completely good or completely bad – there’s a continual tension; sometimes “good” characters make good choices, but sometimes they also make bad ones. The same for “bad” characters. (On this note, I loved, loved, loved, loved Snape’s back-story in both the novel and the movie… Alan Rickman wasn’t just engaging in shameless self-promotion when he remarked that those were some of the most touching scenes in the movie.)

However, the fact that there is a tension between good and bad in all of us is only half the story. The emphasis that Rowling places on personal choice is huge. As Dumbledore tells Harry in The Chamber of Secrets: “It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.” With choice comes consequence. “Good” characters are free to make bad choices, but the consequences of those actions are unavoidable – for example, Sirius’ death is in part a consequence of his ill-treatment of Kreacher. So I was pretty deeply disappointed that there wasn’t any even mention of the possible consequences of the “ends justify the means” mentality that the unforgivable curses represent.

But, this issue was significantly lessened in the movie. Harry only cast one Imperius curse, under the pressure of the goblin to do so. So, even though the issue still wasn’t resolved, the movie didn’t leave me feeling quite as disquieted as the book did.

What the movie did leave me feeling, unfortunately, was a little bit embarrassed, which is a shame because most of the movie was fantastic. But that epilogue… man. I have no particular problem with what happened in the epilogue, but overall I just thought it was pretty goofy. I understand wanting to use the same actors but… they looked about two minutes older than their supposed kids. It would have been nice to have actors that actually reflected the growth and maturity of the characters.

Looking back, I realize that the epilogue was kind of a weak point in the novel, as well. Again, this wasn’t because of anything that happened in the epilogue. I liked it well enough: it was fun to see the characters all grown up, and meet their kids. I guess it’s more about what I was talking about above, about the ramifications of throwing those curses never being played out. It was just that it kind of skipped from x to y too quickly. The last chapter of the book ends with so many loose ends… so much rebuilding to do… so many things that need to be worked through. I mean, Harry has lived the past seventeen years with a part of Voldemort’s soul inside him and being privy his dark thoughts and actions. I would think that getting over that would take some serious counseling. But we end with Harry being reasonably okay and then meet him nineteen years later when everything’s obviously cheery and breezy… I’m not complaining against the happy ending. But perhaps a few more chapters more fully exploring some of the ramifications of the travesties that had occurred… it would have been good (in a somewhat Lord of the Rings fashion, I suppose) to get to see some of the rebuilding instead of just seeing the results of it.

I guess you’re a pretty good author, though, when the major complaint that someone finds against your novel is that it’s not long enough!

But, overall, I thought this movie was fantastic. There were so many lovely things in it… being a long-time fan of Ron and Hermione, it was great to see them finally get together. (Although one thing I liked more about the book is that it placed greater emphasis on Ron’s growing in maturity, confidence, and leadership ability.) And a lot of the ideas in the movie/novel really corresponded to some of my Bible reading lately… I’ve been reading through Luke and just the other day got to the bit where Jesus tells His disciples: “For it is the one who is least among you all who is the greatest.” You see that over and over in the Harry Potter universe: it’s something that Voldemort, obsessed with greatness and power, just can’t understand. That’s why, for example, he goes after Mad Eye Moony first on the night when Harry leaves Privet Drive. But Harry knows differently: we see it from the beginning, when in the very first book he chooses to be friends with Ron rather than with Draco Malfoy. Harry is continually surrounding himself with the weak and with the least, and it is these to whom are given the greatest and most heroic moments: Neville slaying Nagini, Dobby rescuing them from the Malfoy Manor and paying with his life…

As the Bible says: “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” Dobby’s sacrifice was particularly noble, but I think my favorite part about the movie (for some reason it came across more clearly to me in the movie than in the book; more time to think about it, I guess) was the unselfish willingness with which Harry sacrificed himself. This verse from Isaiah was running through my mind during that scene: “He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.” In Harry, I saw a glimmer of the self-sacrificial love of my Savior, and for that reason if no other, I truly thought that this movie was phenomenal.

Behind me sat a pair of guys who were in the middle of a conversation about Nepal or someplace like that. Now, most of the time, it’s pretty surprising how much I don’t remember about the things that I overhear people say. (I guess people talk about pretty boring stuff most of the time.) But I do remember this emphatic statement somewhere in the middle of their conversation: “Well, you know Western Culture. It corrupts everything!”

In America, I think we’ve developed two schools of thought in regard to Western Culture, especially American culture. One school of thought says: “America is great! Progress is great! God sure knew what He was doing when He invented capitalism!” Some people actually think that.

And then there’s the other view, the one that most of us are educated into believing in college, the viewpoint which says: “America stinks! America and all it symbolizes is a blight on the world! Let’s all move to Tibet!” Some people actually think that, too. A growing number of people, since that’s the sort of thing you have to think in order to be considered educated and sophisticated in this country.

And since the evangelical church loves appearing educated and sophisticated, in the church we’ve come to adopt that view, too. We want the world to think that we are socially responsible and not like those crazy fundamentalist hicks who call into country radio stations and request songs like Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue.” We want the world to know that we, too, care about things like corporate greed and the environment and the polluting poison that is Western Culture. That Western Culture, man. It corrupts everything.

What we evangelicals have failed to remember, in our shame-faced eagerness to engage in indiscriminate cultural self-abasement, is that there is no verse in the Bible that says, “And the wages of Western Culture is death.” Or even: “Western Culture is the root of all evil.”

What the Bible does say is that the wages of sin is death, and the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. And last time I checked, those two things – sin and the love of money – were not limited to Western Culture. Both of those things existed far before Western Culture made its appearance on the world stage. And currently… there are plenty of examples of both sin and the love of money in Eastern Culture, as well. (Might I even go so far as to speculate that Western Culture would not be able to corrupt that which was not already susceptible to corruption?)

Culture, whether Western or Eastern or Northern or Southern, is man-made, and therefore open and waiting for the corruption of sin. This shouldn’t take us by surprise. The desire and inclination to sin has been a part of human nature since Adam and Eve first disobeyed God, and every culture reflects that in some way.

Granted, Western Culture, you aren't all that great. The nuclear bomb, for instance, wasn't one of your most fantastic moves.

Are there particular sins that Western Culture excels in? Definitely. Are there sins inherent in Western Culture that we’ve unfortunately exported to most of the world? Certainly. But what if we switched those questions around and asked: are there particular sins that Eastern Culture excels in? The answer would once again be, definitely. Are there sins inherent in Eastern Culture that have unfortunately been exported to a great deal of the world? Quite probably. If anything, the effects of Western Culture are only worse than the effects of Eastern Culture in the fact that, for sundry socio-political reasons, Western Culture is a bit more prevalent.

So, get over yourself, Western Culture. You are not the root of all evil. And sometimes, you actually do some pretty nice things for the world. Think about all the advances in medicine that you’ve been responsible for. Think of all the societies for charity and social improvement that the you’ve spawned. And, hey, evangelicals, remember that it is this same culture that has been historically responsible for the spread of Christianity. Which, as a Christian, I’m pretty sure you’re supposed to think is a good thing!

Is there room for cultural self-criticism? Of course. Western Culture is just as sinful as any other culture on this earth, and there’s lots of things about it that we should be striving to change. However, it’s silly to point to it as being the thing wrong with the world. That thing (sin) existed long before Plato, Aristotle, or even George Washington, and would exist even in lands and peoples untouched by the influence of our culture.

So just get over yourself!

In my Normal Human Growth class we’ve gotten to the section on young adulthood. It’s sobering to think that I am on the tail-end of this classification, and even more sobering to see how classically I fit into the category of youngish adults that my professor called “boomerang kids”: those who have gone off and lived independently but who now, for various reasons, find themselves back at home with the parents.

I don’t think I need to go into any details about how this isn’t a particularly fun place to be all the time. And, in my case, I not only get a pair of parents to live with, but a grandmother, as well. In terms of independence, not ideal at all. It’s not that I don’t love them, but I have to admit I sometimes longingly yearn for the day when I’ll be financially secure enough to be out on my own once again.

That said, one thing that I do have to consistently remind myself is how blessed I am to have parents and grandparents who care for me, and let me impose upon their lives by taking me in and feeding me long past the point that society says they are obliged to do so. In addition, this time at home has given me a chance, not only to appreciate the good points of living alone (haha), but to fully appreciate all the lovely things about the family that God blessed me with.

For example, my mom has to be the most genuinely friendly person I’ve ever met. She treats every person that she meets – from her co-workers, to the grocery store check-out person, to the random guy initiating a conversation while pumping gas – with kindness and respect. People to her are not just commodities or things to be used for their services and then discarded, but human beings worthy of authentic relationship. You can tell that some people are just being ‘nice’ because they feel it’s a duty and it reflects well upon themselves; my mom is nice because that’s who she is.

My sister Christabel* is also my sister, but was unavailable for inclusion in this blog post. But she's pretty cool, too.

My sister Octavia* is also an incredibly nice and giving person. I can be pretty selfish with my things, but she is alwaysgiving without any expectation of return. Clothes, make-up, little acts of service… my sister is a giver.

My dad’s example teaches me a lot about duty. He consistently does what he thinks is right, no matter if there are other things that he’d rather be doing or not. He has a crazy strong work ethic, but he also spends so much of his time working for other people, whether that be through putting in a sound system at the church, or helping my grandma figure out her new TV, or driving me all the way to school instead of making me take a bus. And how boring life would be without hearing a steady stream of Gregorian chants, 80′s rock, and bagpipe music issuing from his office while he’s working? (Ah, the joys of internet radio.)

Our cat is also a member of our family, but I couldn't think of anything good to say about her. Haha.

And as for my grandmother… well, she’s definitely a very caring person who consistently works out her care in tangible (and highly extravagant) ways… whether that be cooking four pounds of pork for dinner one night (after having cooked about three pounds of macaroni salad the night previous) or dropping me off at the bus station and waiting the fifteen minutes before the bus comes, just to make sure I get on all right and don’t get kidnapped. And she’s funny and weird, which is always a plus in my book. For example, the other day I was sitting on my bed doing some cross-stitch, and she came in with a plastic bag of knives that she’s collected through years of metal-collecting. “Reginald* [her boyfriend] is worried about you walking home all alone,” she said. “Look at these knives. I think everyone must carry a knife. What about this switchblade here?”

Yes, my family can be frustrating sometimes. (And yes, I can be frustrating at times, too.) But I am glad (somewhat, haha) that God is giving me this opportunity to appreciate and serve those people who I might tend to overlook in my fervor to serve the world. Perhaps this is how a true heart of service is developed – through serving and loving and persisting with those who know me the best, love me the best, and annoy me the most of anyone on the planet.

* Not their real names.

Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town to another due,
Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov’d fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.