the Gospel on shuffle, stop, repeat.

i've been struggling with anxiety. i've been struggling with anger. i've been struggling with fear. i've been struggling with worry. i've been struggling with greed. i've been struggling with idols. i've been struggling with pride. i've been struggling with memories. i've been struggling with the uncertain future. i've been struggling with God.

so many mental and handwritten posts-born out of ire and despair- have gone unpublished, yet have led to more clarity, as muddy as clarity is.

a painful chiseling of my future, a determination of longitudes and latitudes, of dollars and friendships, of big cities or small towns, of shores or plains. He has made me in a way that i want to discover it all, He has made me in a way that i dread change. He has given me friends, He has made them become close enough to reach that point where ungrateful humans become annoyed with their friends. He has given me community when i only really needed Him.

He has carried me through nights and nights of blood and death and dread. He has carried me through miles and miles of trans-atlantic travels. He has carried my brain when paralyzed with fear, He has carried my hardened heart through grief. He has sent angels to protect me from myself, when i wouldn't listened to Him. He has healed the angel's wings, that i had torn apart.

He pursues, oh! how He pursues.  

the Cross that He planned, the Cross that he ordained, the Cross where He loved, the Cross where He forgave, the Cross where blood and justice rolled. the Cross that gave me life.

and despite the Cross, and despite the Word, i keep requesting proof, and signatures and assurances and promises. i keep requesting my way. i keep requesting answers. i keep requesting my crown and my scepter and my dues. i keep requesting my reward.
and i argue about my thoughts, and i argue about my motives, and my heart changes every five minutes, like a child who has cried for a red balloon and dis-interestingly lets go of it for a blue ice cream cone. i exhaust myself with my own thoughts.

thankful that He doesn't change like my inconsistent heart does. thankful He changes my heart although i still doubt it. thankful He has it under control even when i try to grab the wheel. thankful He loves, thankful He pursues, thankful He sanctifies the brat that i am. thankful He talks to me when i wouldn't want to talk to me. thankful He hasn't given up when i'm about to, thankful He nudges and thankful He makes me listen. thankful He reminds me to believe, as i doubt over and over and over again, as i doubt and believe, as i believe but what-if, like a never ending tune on a broken piano. thankful for His endless patience and grace.




 

the hypocrisy of privacy

 

it has occurred to me multiple times to block people with "undesirable" opinions (ie not 98.3% identical to mine), mimicking what the now facebook-despising-intellectual-elite is currently practicing.
how convenient would that be in the real world to tune out all those voices that you do not agree with.

i submit to you that :

b. social media should be a 'training ground for the real world" (if we've achieved that with our sins, take cyber-bullying for example), shouldn't we at least practice holiness online as well?

a. most importantly, blocking people only goes to cultivate the twirling and twirling of the vicious circle of refusing to learn from other people. wait rewind the vicious circle of even considering for a split second that an alternate opinion might be viable, carry some worth.
has humility been obliterated so massively, that we refute ideas as they are bouncing off of one cement wall to another in our cranium, not even peeking through the fence into our synapses?

all that is not me is worthless. cant do more blunt than that, building your own kingdom.

being guilty of that, i also confess that the passive benefit that is the fruit of other people's active facebook scrolling, is pretty appealing to lazy souls.



 

 

"My family's Google searching got us a visit from counterter​rorism police" by Michele Catalano is a blog post that I recently read through a link on a friend's wall.

 

side note (at least I give warning about side notes now...) I've actually never really met this friend, but I've been assured of his highly educated, cultured, eclectic and cosmopolitan nature by our mutual acquaintance. i.e my mother. and you always believe your mother,.she is another example of sanctified opinions bouncing off of cement walls, opinions that you do not question. until that painful moment when you do, and you crucify her for being merely human. how can she be wrong?? she's mom!!! another reason to tell your kids about Jesus, folks. let them trust Him, because He, He has already been crucified and has won. don't let them make you their God. the harsh reality of you being a human mother will crush them someday.

 

 

anyway this seemingly really cool guy posts this article

 

well written, with the right amount of details, funny but not too sarcastic. i loved it. read it. also read it because i'm so proud of having discovered how to insert a link there.




i have been the leftist rebellious anti-capitalist, anti-corporate tween, i swore never to change, and i don't think i have. many things still shock me and disgust me. i've learned to swallow my zofran and pick my battles.
as a professional now (not relying on small envelopes filled with cash and blessing notes left by papi on the nightstand), i also understand that small sacrifices make institutions work. that idealist kids look at the nuances at the horizon but someone has to unclog and oil the cogwheels.

this is not cynicism but the poetry of practicality. il faut de tout pour faire un monde... personally,  i am more likely to fall in love now with the hard-working miner with calloused hands than the languishing poet testing his risk for DVTs laying in a field of daisies. (maybe God will have the miner play the violin in his spare time)




back to the post. i understand the concerns for privacy. for personal liberties. for in-a-perfect-world-theories. for whatever amendment that is, i'll memorize them when i get offered a green card.
but the world is not perfect. i travel multiple times a year and get screened. because of the drawing of a cedar tree on my passport (ironic that the cedar is actually mentioned more than 70 times in the bible, so it really shouldn't be linked to terrorist threats) but the reality we live in dictates that i don't mind, because "random" screening might have, unknowing to me, saved my life.

if that ct scanner, that caused so much ink to be spilled and blood pressures to rocket, saves my mom's life on a 24hour-3 plane trip from Lebanon, or allows me to put my teenage kids on a dream flight to Vienna without experiencing cold sweats of dread, then scan away. of note, the drastically anticlimactic yellow snowman version of me that i excitedly peaked at after that infamous scan, was the least invasion of privacy i have witnessed this summer.

as the world is willingly exposing its toned or cellulitic thighs in briefs that like to think of themselves as shorts, when more breasts are exposed at the grocery store than in haroon al rashid's harem, when the world' sexual prowess is being analyzed on every bookshelf at a four-year-old's eye level, can we please stop hypocritically complaining about the loss of privacy that we ourselves have relinquished?

they can look at all my embarrassing google searches, impulsive groupon purchases, and every single French to English translation that i've looked up for the purpose of this blog, if that might potentially avoid more families being torn to pieces and more firemen developing eosinophilic pneumonias because of criminal dust.

they can come search my house if they think the antique coal iron,
or (god forbid) the polyester pants that i bought were suspicious.

does anyone have a better idea or would you put your children on that plane if a crazy-eyed guy with a machete was boarding? just remember that crazy eyes can be hidden with inexpensive concealer and machetes are now an app on your iphone.

all that from a persistent leftist rebel at heart.
God bless America.