Claudia and Duffy

The A/C is out

To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.
G. K. Chesterton (1874 - 1936)

One of the built-in hazards of this job is that it requires introspective analysis of my own spiritual life every so often. This is what I discovered late two nights ago.

Love is patient. I am not.

Love is kind. I really amn't. Sometimes I want to kick puppies, just for latent cruelty's sake. Never mind what I want to do to people.

Love is not jealous or envious. Um, yeah. Ask Rachel how much I've been having a hard time with that one, as I am currently listening to her beautiful cello playing on an actual CD.

Love is not boastful or proud, Oh sh...

never haughty or selfish or rude. "Snob" pretty much covers that.

Love does not demand its own way, Heck, I even pray that way.

it is not irritable or touchy, ...and you know God understands about PMS and still expects this!

it does not hold grudges and hardly even notices when others do it wrong. Last one's probably the worst, as evidenced by the earliest home videos we have with me trying to order my cousin how to play his piano piece the right way.

Now, this is the cool thing, though. After I was lying there in my too-warm bed, rather too much on the wilted side to be crushed by my condemnation, God re-listed it back to me - and every single one had some small evidence that he changes the way I behave. For example, there was a grudge that I had held about an absolutely ridiculous piece of cast iron for an entire year, and just a couple of weeks ago, God beat on my stubborn head in the night until I cried over the issue (idiot), and the end result was of course that he took the grudge away from me without me wanting him to. I don't know why I'm shocked every time this happens. You can talk about free will all you want, and this is how it works. I am free to say "No, God, I'm keeping that one," and then in a split second, I don't have it anymore. I mean, I even tried to feel mean about it again, and I couldn't. I didn't even have any guilt over my part in the incident. The whole thing was just gone, wrenched out of my will.

God loves me.

Posted by tuggy at 08.05.05 00:17 | TrackBack