Idle and Blessed

I visited a friend the other day. I have some friends that bring out my sage qualities, and he's one of them. Whenever we talk, I find myself saying really wise things like, "There's a certain point where you have to start chasing what you want in life instead of waiting for it to come to you," or asking things like, "If you could go back, what would you tell your 18 year old self?" I'm not sure why. Maybe I'm responding to his need for a therapist by becoming one. I'm sure that's a healthy response. Maybe I'm the one who needs a therapist. But I digress. I visited this friend, and I wasn't in a particularly talkative or peppy mood, so I just sort of stopped interjecting myself into the conversation. Stopped making an effort to squeeze in a sentence. And the interesting thing was, an hour went by where I hadn't expressed a single thought. I simply listened and nodded my head. I began to put more energy into this conversation...

I staffed Don Miller's Storyline conference last weekend at Belmont. Not only is Storyline an important conference for writers and anyone looking to live a better life, it's also really cool because Donald Miller is there. So I volunteered. We are friends now. What first drew me to Don's books was how honest and skeptical he was about things, and how he wrote like a true introvert (read: like me). Introversion and I have a really close relationship. I remember reading in Don Miller's books that he is an introvert too, and yet he believes people get weird when they don't interact with other people. In my experience this is totally true, but I like to keep my interaction with people at a minimum. It's too exhausting. So anyway, I started writing the storyline of my life at the conference. I'm still only about halfway through it, but I don't think I've experienced anything so insightful before. I wrote my backstory, my ambitions, my relationships/c...

I think God is smarter than we give him credit for. We run from failure and pretend to be competent, as if he didn't design life to include guaranteed failure. We hide our ugly places, as if he never figured out we had them. We lie to each other, present false versions of ourselves in public, pretending perfection is possible. We like to fix things and promise to be Saviors when the truth is that we are broken and have not yet been rescued from that. I talk about God like he's a proposition and forget to talk to him, my closest friend. I insist on being afraid of things, which is laughable since I know the end of the story. I tell God I'm waiting for him to write my story. He handed me a crayon and paper at birth, though. I make excuses for my superiority complex and forget I'm talking to Yahweh Elohim. God is smarter than we...no, I...give him credit for.