More doubt

Christ will not say to me what he said to the Jews: You erred, not knowing the Scriptures and not knowing the power of God. For if, as Paul says, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God, and if the man who does not know Scripture does not know the power and wisdom of God, then ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ. - St. Jerome

I long for the days when I was confident in my faith, when I knew that God was real and that my faith was well-founded, when I had confidence that the historical accounts of the first apostles had been handed down whole and unfiltered, and that my sin and shortcomings were forgiven and fulfilled by a merciful and loving God.  It isn't that I'm ignorant of the Scriptures.  It's just that I'm ignorant.

The emotional lift I get from praising God, from singing and proclaiming His perfect love: is that real, or is that simply a matter of my brain bathing itself in its own chemicals?

The implications of this question for me, personally, are best left unexamined.

I pretty much hate it when I oversleep and don't have time for prayer in the morning . . .

Not 4 publication

I left our marriage encounter meeting on Saturday feeling reassured and secure.  Faye and Clive hosted and presented; their talk was on The Five Love Languages.  Gary Chapman's basic premise is that too many marriages fail because the way each member expresses their love doesn't align with how their partner best receives it, so they never recharge their respective "love tank."  But it isn't simply a matter of compatibility.  It's just important to know, so we can express our love in the way our partner can best receive it.  It's far easier to make an active decision how to express our love than to recognize and receive it in a way that isn't in our primary or secondary language.

I've been struggling to see how my marriage is going to rebalance in light of establishing a healthy view of the two of us for probably the first time in our lives together.  One of the things that has been a concern to me, the thing at the root of what I've had to be careful how I think about, is how few interests we share in common.  It has been the basis for that niggling thought I've had to put away: if I'd been a healthy young adult (for that matter, had either of us been), I doubt we would ever have been a couple.

But I learned on Saturday that we have the same primary and secondary love languages - though I wonder if that would have been the case had we taken our surveys based solely on our own natural  preferences, unfiltered by what we've learned to prefer in the context of our relationship together.  Still, I found it reassuring: (am going to overuse that word) that there's good reason we've managed to preserve our relationship through so much emotional devastation and despite our very different personalities and interests, and good reason to hope we'll be able to continue to thrive in the future.

So discovering that our coupleness is reinforced by our primary and secondary love language preferences helps me to understand how we've survived all that we have, how we can love each other so much in spite of everything.  Sunday morning we had a wonderful, intimate time together, and considering that 1) "physical touch" is our primary love language, 2) this has been the area of our relationship in which we struggle least, and 3) we were really aware of our need to be quiet for the sake of the others in the house,  that's really saying something.  (Hopefully rather than weirding the reader out, this will encourage you that you have something really nice to look forward to as time goes by.)  We both mentioned it during the day, alluded to it in our dialogue last night, and the mrs. brought up again as we snuggled in bed how wonderfully the day had started.

Then she asked the $64,000 (more, really) question.  I really wish she'd've skipped it.  I answered affirmatively and supportively, and without giving a clue that I've been wondering for months myself about this exact question.

"We're more than that, right?"

So this morning I'm trying to just feel reassured that she'd wonder, too.  Isn't it interesting that we're both pondering this question?  That's something else we have in common, right?

I'm not being facetious with that.  I really think it may be another hopeful thing.  I'm more concerned that I thought it more important to reassure her than to be honest with her.

"Avoid anything in your everyday lives that would be unworthy of the gospel of Christ."  Phil 1:27

This doesn't seem so challenging, does it?

St. Paul and St. Vincent

"Life to me, of course, is Christ, but then death would bring me something more; but then again, if living in this body means doing work which is having good results-I do not know what I should choose. I am caught in this dilemma: I want to be gone and be with Christ, which would be very much the better. "  - Phil 1, 21-23

An internal debate of mine, but in a far better context.  Yet I cannot help but think that St. Paul had the advantage of having overcome his failings. While my worst moments are in my past, they do not fade, nor have I finished yanking out their roots.  I don't like my remaining weakness, sinfulness, addiction to endorphines, whatever term we might wish to use for self-indulgence.  Yet I don't seem to hate it enough, either.

"If a needy person requires medicine or other help during prayer time, do whatever has to be done with peace of mind. Offer the deed to God as your prayer. Do not become upset or feel guilty because you interrupted your prayer to serve the poor. God is not neglected if you leave him for such service. One of God’s works is merely interrupted so that another can be carried out. So when you leave prayer to serve some poor person, remember that this very service is performed for God. Charity is certainly greater than any rule. Moreover, all rules must lead to charity. Since she is a noble mistress, we must do whatever she commands. With renewed devotion, then, we must serve the poor, especially outcasts and beggars. They have been given to us as our masters and patrons." - St. Vincent de Paul

How interesting that this reading and feast day should follow yesterday's gospel reading.  I've far too much in common with the self-indulging rich man, and far too little identification with Lazarus.

Must remember . . .

 . . .  this . . .

Interesting stories

By this standard, if the reader finds me not interesting, it's because you don't know me.

I truly wish I wasn't.

And yet there's plenty to argue with, here, too.  Having read the months of storyline, I disagree that "Gran and Peter made all the wrong decisions," and the ones they did make were not necessarily those the woman in this strip thinks they were.

After some recent time pondering the wrong decisions in my life, I find that the real mistakes really don't take any pondering to recognize.