A friend asked me recently for thoughts on four subjects. Since it feeds the ego to be asked ones opinion of anything, I took the bait. Not because my ego is starving, but because I wondered if I even still have opinions on these things, all of which I've wrestled with, against, or for. I'll leave it to you to figure out which.

Religion: Is flawed, but people embrace religion because they realize they're flawed too. So there's something beautiful about the people who embrace this flawed cancer of religion. It's when religion embraces them that things get ugly. Isn't it interesting that the only people that ticked Jesus off were the religious? If being religious was the way to get close to God, the Pharisees would have been Jesus best friends. God loves people but doesn't seem to have much good to say about the systems we create that confine Him or keep people from Him. God's wrath is aimed at whatever interferes with His love.

Emotion: Can ruin your life, but if you have none then life is already ruined. Jesus healed people when He was "moved with compassion." It's how you respond to emotion and the actions that you take in that response that reveal so many things about the deepest places in you. Watching a normally stable person struggle to take a note as their dead pen gouges the paper is a great way to see that under the right conditions, (even one so simple) everyone can feel....again.

Addiction: It's jumping out of an airplane with a knitted parachute, helpless against the thrust of descent. It's a butterfly battling against a hurricane. Paper wings in the storm you never imagined could be so strong. It's embracing a habit that is growing tired of you. When you can love and hate just a few breaths apart. It's the final scene in Oz, where the tin man is still an idiot, the lion is still afraid, you've given up on the wizard, and all you want to do is to go home. It's staring at an army of zombies. Too many monsters, so little ammunition. All of these charming paradoxes...

that keep us from knowing...

when it's ok...

to breathe.

Addictions remind us of how helpless we are without the relentless affection of a Saviour.

Our World: God loves it and died to redeem it, and only He knows why. I'm so glad He is.... I'm so glad that He just "is".