Bees in My Bonnet

Valentine's Day is charged with emotion - hopes, fears, and sometimes just a wishing it would all go away and pass quickly.  The love we wish for isn't always there - whether we're married or single.  And the love we feel from those who genuinely love us isn't always enough, or thrilling or everything we were hoping for. Too much is chalked up to how I feel about these things. I used to hate Valentine's Day.  Thought it was so gushy, mushy, sentimental, sweet and so not real life. And then I got married, and wanted to make the most of it.  In fact, I thought in marriage it would be the best time to celebrate wedded love. Well, I won't say much on that, 'cuz we just happen to not be the sentimental sort - except for every other day of the year, when I am showered with love that is undeserved, unmerited and so beyond what I had every hoped for. But the bedrock of my life is not romantic love.  It is PERFECT LOVE. I base my existence on the fact th...

I have more to say on the Book of Job. Going back to his lame-o friends...  Yeah, they needed a good theology lesson.  And here I am centuries later to give it to them. I think they had issues.  Real issues.  They couldn't handle that God is sovereign and acts according to the counsel of His own will  - sans our input or even any obligation to give us an explanation for what He does. They got it wrong because God was behaving contrary to what their human wisdom/reasoning would expect.  They thought God was there to serve them  - that God's job was to act according to the plan.   That plan is: Play fair (according to my understanding of fairness).  Reward and punish within good reason (human reason, that is).  Be powerful, but beholden to my  will.  Those are the kinds of things we would expect God to do and be.  Because we are human we so badly mix up our desires for how we want God to act with our understanding of ...

So we've been reading Job (in the Bible) together as a family.  It's a challenging book - full of questions and musings... And the discussions have been interesting. It's so easy to see suffering, question it, and we SO BADLY want an answer.  We want to know why, what for, purpose, goals and such.  We want to engineer life so we can avoid suffering.  If we knew the theological neat and tidy little package as to all the why's of life, we could just dot every little i we're missing and go on our merry way knowing that God will surely cater to our sloppy theology and give us what we want so that we can praise ourselves knowing we did better than the next guy whose suffering we can't comprehend. Okay, maybe we're not ALL like that, just some of us. And the book of Job, and the description of his suffering is so our there... far from our reach, far from our understanding.  It blows us away with how bad his life was and how few answers there were for his pa...

So I was thinking lately about when Jesus says that it isn't what goes into a person's body that makes him unclean but the thoughts and words that come from within him/her. And I thought about integrity and honesty and secrecy... and I wondered... Here are some of my musings: You know, I can keep a tight rein on my lips - I can control not saying certain things that I think to people.  And when they frustrate me, I can keep it quiet.  I can look at them and judge them in my heart, but if I don't say it, maybe that's okay.  Oh, and if it really bothers me, I can probably tell a trusted friend - you know, in private, like in email or on the phone, or even in person.  I could share it as a 'burden' or a cause for prayer - like a prayer request.  Because I really don't know how to help this person I look down on.  And it can be a matter of privacy that I think these things.  I can be sweet and meek and nice and kind to those around me, all the while h...