Grief Begets Good

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I'm supposed to be finishing my flash lesson which I'm presently four weeks behind on for my online course. But I can't seem to will self to do industrious. I'm feeling heavy and cerebral and I've been feeling this way all week. The holidays. Do they ever force a kind of plastic happiness on you? Do they ever compel you to push all that grief and distress all the way there under the tree skirt, because you are meant to think those feelings are immaterial?

Because I think those feelings should be allowed to coexist there with merry and bright and eyes all aglow, without being tagged Scrooge. Without a Bah Humbug Dismissal.

I've been hearing of so many painful things happening in the lives of my family and friends this week. I won't list them like a rap sheet of tragic. But I won't Polyannalyze them away as if they should be marginalized because it's the holidays.

At the heart of this season for me is a spirit of sharing, and sometimes it is our burdens that are meant to be parceled out so that somehow, the sadness truly can be divided in love.

Lately, I'm lifting up a lot of prayers all day long, and honestly, I'm having some chats with God right now that you do not want to listen in on. And yet, I am so glad that God is so much bigger than all of the stuff that this world can afford us. I'm buoyed by His assurance that His mercy is good and true.

"But though He cause grief, yet will He have compassion according to the multitude of His mercies." ~ Lamentations 3:32

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I've got also two little gems looking up at me that remind me of one more mark of this season. The beauty and innocence of a child's belief in all that is good.

busted

Rags

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There's a messageboard I'm active on where critical topics are debated vigorously, often venomously.  Topics such as whether or not it is appropriate to include inserts of your wedding registry in your wedding invitation (I'm opposed) and whether or not Joey McIntyre is indeed the hawtest NKOTB 4+eva (I'm ambivalent).  But occasionally there is a topic that really stirs the pot and recently it was about Catholicism.  Specifically, one poster was polling the Catholics among us about being, essentially, "cafeteria Catholics."  That is, picking and choosing which tenets of the faith to call their own, and which to disclaim.  The debate spiraled round and round and up and down and left no abortion rights issue unexamined, no matter of transubstantiation unturned.  When all the dust settled, nothing really became that much more manifest, other than the fact that people believe what they believe. And that's fine with me.  Only, it's tempting, it's oh so tempting for this Catholic-born and raised and educated turned Adventist to want to stick her neck out for these debates.  To expose the fallacies, to really pound the proverbial gavel about what really is truthful, what really is honorable, and do you really think at the end of the day being a "good" person is the sum total of those piddley things alone?

But then I am reminded.  Isaiah 64:6.  All our righteous acts are as filthy rags.  That's right.  Our righteousness is as the snot rags all waddled up in your pocket.  Who are any of us to judge, who are any of us, Catholic, Adventist, Jew, Buddhist, heck, even Jihadist to think we are any better, that our sins are not any more scarlet in God's eyes, that we are not all hypocrits, wholly in need of God's goodness alone.

I read something awhile back about the trump card of trump cards and I think it captures so well this humbling concept of *truly* being righteous, achieving a righteousness fit for eternity.  Ironically, it is written about something that I don't necessarily believe in, that is, the quiverfull movement, but it is interesting nonetheless.