depravity

It's been awhile since I've been reminded of this. And that is this: it's easy to be an okay person around people you are not terribly close to. And when you're around people you're not terribly close to, you begin to convince yourself that you are, in fact, an okay person. Until you truly believe that you're an okay person.

For me, it was much easier to be convicted of my sin in high school. Which is ironic, since I attribute a lot of my spiritual growth to my college years. But it was in high school that I faced real conflict. Mostly with my family, and mostly because I lived at home. But once I went to college, I found myself surrounded by people I knew less well. Sure, I would say that I've made some really close friends, but I was never forced into the kind of intimacy that you have with your parents and your siblings. Or the kind of intimacy that you start to have with your significant other.

And it's worse now that I've graduated. I get along with my family just fine (which I appreciate). I get along with my coworkers. I get along with people at church. But it's taken the beginning of a somewhat more intimate relationship to give me a rude awakening to the fact that, hello, I suck. That there's a bunch of garbage inside of me that I completely forgot about. Sure, it takes some prodding to stir it all up to the surface. But it's there. My recent spiritual life has been a reflection of that inner stagnation all along, but sometimes it takes some (and hardly any, really) intimacy to really bring it all out into the open.

No one has any right to talk to anyone about love until they've actually tried to love someone. And not love someone as in, be nice to your neighbor. Love as in, love. Very descriptive, I know. It's hard. And it really isn't that surprising that the divorce rate is so high. We're not worse off than we were before. We're just better at accepting these things.

I'm writing a lot. But really, what I feel right now, is probably just the tip of the iceberg. I have no right to talk about love, either. Me being so experienced and all... 

But in all seriousness. To those people who say "God is either all-powerful or all-loving, but He can't be both because of all the suffering in this world": if you're anything like me at all, you really have no idea what love is. Would it be all-loving to give everyone what they wanted? What I think is good is so not-good sometimes. Especially in my attempts to relate to others. I'm so self-centered that I'm completely blind to my self-centeredness. And that's a cycle that only God can pull me out of. But really, sometimes I'm so convinced that what I'm doing from self-centeredness is actually the loving thing to do. Blah. Random protip: if you're going to send out a serious email, wait at least 24 hours before doing so. Okay, I realize I'm probably not making any sense here, but that's fine.

Who are we to question God? I think Francis Chan said something along the lines of, God has more of a right to question us about the suffering in this world. I agree.