andrew yang

random thought about andrew yang.

 

he talks AI, he talks automation, he talks about 21st century, and those are the true things framed in the wrong way for voters.

 

Voters lost their jobs because of these things, yes, but the voters resonated with trump who told them it was immigrants who were stealing their jobs.

 

It’s much easier to think of people taking their jobs than machines.  There’s a much more defined enemy, and you can point to a group of people you can specifically hate, especially those who look like they’re entering our country illegally.

 

How do you point to machinery?  How do you hate a machine?

 

So it’s a trick, but in order to convince voters, he has to affirm the reality of what they’re experiencing, and present an alternative explanation for why their lives suck.  Not immigrants, but machines.

 

Either way they’re losing jobs, so solution is either to get rid of immigrants so that people can keep their jobs, or keep both immigrants and jobs and give money to people so that they don’t need those jobs and can instead invest and learn something else.

 

While it boosts the economy, 1k a month is not necessarily enough to live off of – they’ll need a job in addition to the UBI.  What job can they get if machines are taking all the jobs they’re trained to do?  Spend money to be trained doing something else I guess.

 

That’s the question Andrew Yang needs to answer.  UBI puts money into everyday voters who are struggling without work so that they live to fight another day – but what’s the solution to a sustained job where they don’t have to rely solely on UBI?

 

No wonder no one’s talking about it – it’s a tough concept to crack.  Much easier to blame immigrants.

 

Inspiration

Sharing stories.

 

Turns out there will be an article out soon about my generous donation to the brain tumor foundation.  I did not expect that.  I’m usually reluctant to take credit and to take the spotlight, but the more I think about it, the more I realize it’s a function of the stoics in me that makes me want to back down in this regard.

 

If I look at how our church has operated, and how we’re branching out to PR and letting the world know about who we are, I suppose the same can be allowed for my own small actions.

 

That is, with the benefit not to applaud myself, but to inspire the world, and more directly, to inspire the world based on my motives, which were in affirmation of the truth “one’s life does not consist in the abundance of their possessions.”

 

Yeesh.  Look what I started.  Ah well, come what may then.

 

 

Biking for 6 days

The way I see it, you’re being too hard on yourself, as well as being too easy on yourself.

You’re emotional, so you think that something must be wrong because Christian life does not feel good, or that you don’t feel passion or zeal in trying to live out Christian life or in Christian service.

I would argue that it’s okay not to feel it, heck, even if you never feel it for 50 years, and even for a million years. Because Christian life is not going to satisfy, just like nothing in this world could ever satisfy, for we were made for another world, and only the divine accolade of well done good and faithful servant will give us what we truly desire – acceptance by our God and to be pleasing to our Heavenly Father as his children.

That’s just Christian life – you’re being too emotionally hard on yourself if you think you need to feel it in order to genuinely believe. To genuinely believe you neeed to, in some sense, not care about feeling it. You believe because you have reasons for believing it’s true, no matter how enticing the world feels and how it feels better than the tools and stress of giving it your all for Christian life.

And on the other hand, you better make sure you don’t make it too easy on yourself. When it comes to serving, it’s fine to do it without feeling like you want to do it yet, and do it only because you intellectually know the feelings won’t come until after you obey.  But when it comes to being saved, you know you need to get there eventually.

The heart, and feelings of what the heart wants, are what matter in the end. We take actions each and every day that shape our hearts and help us practice the way we want our heart to be. If we fill our hearts with the things of God, selflessness, humility, surrender, sacrifice, love, suffering, then we understand the heart of God and we will enjoy Him and Heaven when we get there.

However, if we are pulled by the things of this world and it’s fleeting pleasures, we mistake these false pleasures as substitutes for the real thing, the real joy that comes with losing your life to save it as we seek to save our lives like all our non-Christian brethren. We become tricked and believe in lies like all the rest. Wanting a piece of land to call our own, our own time, energies, wanting luxury cars or leisure activities, going out to eat, relax, Netflix and chill, movies, books, to do the same as our coworkers, go bike riding for 6 days, drink espressos, go on vacations, and pursue money to keep up that lifestyle – at some point there needs to be a choice not to conform to the ways of the world.

Because if our desires are not transformed, then heaven will not be heaven, we’ll still be separated from God and eternal goodness and Jesus would say i never knew you. The things I just mentioned, they are earthly and less than God, so it makes sense that Heaven would not have things that require money, for instance, or video games or tv shows or biking. So if you train your heart to indulge your selfish desire for these things of the world, you’ll feel tortured by the fact that your heart can’t get these things in

heaven.

On the other hand, if you have God, you get all these things thrown in – with God, there is more, not less of the life we enjoy. The feelings of wanting a piece of land to call our own is no longer necessary – we know there is no such land as all is under the purview of the Lord and we rightly enjoy what the Lord enjoys, the proper consumption of our desires as Lewis might put it, and we experience true freedom as a result, similar but better than the person who gets to live out the lifestyle they wanted on earth.

We only want our own time because we know on earth there is death – in heaven there is not. On earth time is precious, in heaven you have an eternity of it. So there’s no longer a desire or competition between the things of God and the good things that are not God. In heaven, we can have both, as the time we want for ourselves is given us by God. We only wanted to feed ourselves and our selfish desires because we believed the world was finite – we can be selfless we when we affirm the reality that it is infinite. Scarcity and fear of death is what motivates us here on earth, and it’s what motivates others to pursue selfish desires over self-less was with God.

Digression:

Herein lies the problem – you can take the man out of slavery, but not the slavery out of man. If you train your heart on earth to be enslaved to needing this lifestyle, enslaved to the need to feed yourself because you’re enslaved by fear of your own death and the scarcity of your time, then you’ll still be sadly insular even when there’s an eternity I reality – you wont believe the promises of the Lord and seek to want to world instead of God. God will say to you, thy will be done, and it will be so – God will leave you alone and you will have what you pursued and wanted. You’ll be forever cut off from divine life because you’ll be stuck wanting only things that are if this world. Heaven will simply feel like a place that takes you away from what you want, so it’ll feel like hell.

Luxury cars only feel like a luxury because it costs a limited resource, money. It wouldn’t be luxury if everyone could afford it, and people only want it because it’s hard to get and ppl pursue hard to get things because they think it’s worth the resources, so they pursue their career to get the money to buy the things they think they need, things that require effort because it’s  only luxury because other ppl don’t have it.

Same with leisure activities, going out to eat. Good things, but might train us to think we are the most important things in the universe, and in our failure to spend time on people by spending it on ourselves, we fail to love and therefore fail to shape our hearts and fault to please God, instead training our hearts to possibly be deceived by this world and it’s pleasures being all that there is to look forward to.

Where each next thrill can be found in the next episode people create, and we mistake pleasure as coming from the story written by the authors and fail to see it’s from the resonance of their words with ourselves and the God who made us. And we pursue money as our God who makes all these things possible.

Where we do things like them with our time, and forget that we are like Him and our time is ultimately his.

Those are not bad things, but if we are not careful they can become idols that we mistake for the real thing. That’s why the warning is there, because the heart and the intentions of the heart carried over in the eternity of the soul are the only things that matter in the end.

So beware and be vigilant and hard on yourself in this way – you don’t need to always have the right feelings and the desire to live out Christian life, but you do need to feel what God feels about this life being fleeting in order to be saved into a heaven worth attaining. That’s why there’s always the risk of Jesus saying well done good and faithful servant as well as I never knew you – it’s by grace for those who believe in Jesus for eternal life, Jesus who said lose your life to save it.

If you don’t live out this calling and instead try to live a more “balanced life” with more of the world, you run the risk of the world enslaving your heart. Or more accurately, if you go to a church that is more lukewarm and less commitment, you might be more swayed by the lies of the world as you’re surrounded by others who might be the same. Not necessarily though – there are many churches with less commitment but might still have zealous believers – it’s not up to me to judge their heart; only the Lord can do that. I simply judge their actions – some obvious red flags are those who pursue a jet-setting lifestyle where money is more important than the things of God, but pursuit of money could also be used to gain eternal friends. So it depends on the heart and intention of the heart, which only God can judge in the end.

Which is why i stay at this church. I want a church that is the most motivating, the most willing to curb my heart and desires for this world – I want a coach that is the most committed to me achieving my goals, and my goal is Christ, and to enjoy Him when I get there.  It’s a life where I fully embrace reality – life is short, eternity is long, so live for heaven. I stay at the church where so feel like so can die to myself the most, that is, in accordance to the amount of faith I have – I don’t have the faith to be a missionary in Muslim countries yet for instance. But I have enough to want to want to stay at this church which helps me grow and with like-minded believers who also see reality the same about the fleeting joys in  this world, and the eternal joys in the next.  And I am surrounded by people committed to give this reality to others, to see the world as harassed and helpless and to have compassion on them – to see that I want to be a part of that mission. That is the life I want for myself, and it’s the life I want for others. That is wanting Jesus for Jesus, wanting Jesus even if I give up the things of this life to give up what I cannot keep to gain what I cannot lose.

So, think of it that way. Do you see others in this way? If you do, then you’ll have to see yourself this way. If not, then you’ll have to question what exactly you believe about Jesus, and whether or not you believe His words and commandments as things you want to live out in your life. Thankfully, we don’t have to do it alone and we are part of a church committed to giving it our all to do exactly that. Why would I want a less committed church if that’s the risk to my heart? I’d want the most commitment, again, in measure to the amount of faith I have, and the heart I know so have and the amount of sway I know the world holds over me and the amount of convictions i hold to fight that limping between two opinions.

But that’s not how it starts. You’re not limping between the things of the world and the things of God – you’re being too hard on yourself. This is what Christian life looks like, to do things even when you don’t feel like it, and what you’re really limping between is serving God and deriving pleasure from it, or serving God without feeling like you want to do it. You can keep walking and limping between these opinions for as long as it takes – indeed, you’ll have to if you are to attain heaven and the Lord and enjoy it when you get there.

The limping that the Bible teaches us to avoid is the first, the limping we can’t avoid is the second.

As a mental exercise – imagine you got into heaven, but your best friend that you grew up with for years seems to still be rebellious and is not surrendering their life to Christ.  Would you be willing to trade places with that friend, and give up your ticket to heaven?

Would you be willing to be like Jesus – give up heaven for the sake of the otherwise damned?

I think for all who claim to want to go to heaven, and for those who reach it, they probably feel similar sentiments.  Most likely, a situation like Abraham and Issac would occur – God would say, wait wait, don’t give up your son, now that I know your heart is willing to do even this, then you truly have the same heart of God.  For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son so that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

That’s the God we strive to be like, and the mental exercise suggests we must give up heaven if we are to truly love God for God and not for what he can do for us.

For those who follow Jesus simply because they’re afraid of death – realize that in the end the Lord demands you die to oneself and be willing to give up, not really give up, just like Abraham was willing to give up his son, not really giving him up in the end, to do all that with giving up even eternal life for the sake of the lost.

Kind of complicated, right?  Kind of difficult?  That’s what we’re called to, and it’s right.  So yes, although we are completely saved by grace, Jesus himself is the condition by which we are saved, it’s not baseless grace.  We need to believe in Jesus, the man who said these things, died for these things, and rose to conquer all things, if we are to be saved: question is, do you believe in these words of Jesus?

There’s a reason why the road is wide that leads to destruction and those who are saved enter by the narrow gate, and why it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of the needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven – he has too much he must be willing to leave behind.  That’s why we must lose our lives to save it, and those who save their life will lose it.  That is the life-long challenge and the condition by which we are saved through Christ.  It’s hard work to train our hearts, though the opportunity comes solely through the grace of God.  Not all those who are of Israel are Israel.  There are those who receive the grace of God to whom Jesus says I never knew you.

So it’s a lot – to leave behind the things of this world and the things that others pursue.  But, the promises of scripture are that we’ll get to keep the good parts of what this earth has to offer, and that God simply wants to see our hearts, as God wanted to see Abraham’s heart, and wanted Abraham to train his heart.

Now that I think about it – that’s the same issue with calvinism – they think salvation is by grace, which they equate to without man’s effort, but even God said the condition is that we must believe in Jesus to have eternal life, and it takes effort to believe that truth, the words of our Lord in the midst of such lies.  That effort, that art of holding on to what you have reasons to believe to be true, is what we call having faith, and without faith it is impossible to please God, so we must exert effort to keep faith – it’s not without effort.  That’s where Calvinism gets it wrong – in fear of too much effort and too little dependence on God’s grace which saves, they neglect the necessity of surrender, which is an effortful attempt of submission and sacrifice even though the world teaches us not to.  It is a choice to give up choice, and we must choose that in order to be truly saved.

I’m Back

Lot’s changed, and the most jarring is the one that snuck up on me – it’s been way too long since I last wrote something on this blog.  Looking back, I’m amazed that I have stuff here from 2008, and I’m sure I wrote stuff on a xanga before this WordPress.  That’s 11 years.  Crazy.  And here I am now.  Where is that exactly?

 

Married.  Yup, that’s probably the biggest change in my life.  Well obviously, that’s not all true – my wife’s brother passed away, my father passed away, found out my mother has lung cancer, but thankfully it’s being treated and she has a relatively normal lifestyle.  That’s definitely a blessing that I’m only just now starting to appreciate.

 

So yeah, lots has been going on, so I think it’d be a good idea if I restarted this blog for myself, so that I can “/get it all down on paper so that it’s no longer inside of me, threatening the life it belongs to./”

 

Where to start?  Let’s just start with today.  I’m trying to use more feeling words, so let’s see.. I’m feeling.. weak-willed.  There’s all these things I have on my list of things I want to do, taking care of dad’s car at the DMV and Carmax, calling up the interior door ppl to get that replaced, set up a workout routine, sou vide my own meals, write that book I’ve been meaning to write, finish all my work at work, write my wife her birthday card, send emails letting my friends know I’m praying for them, etc.  So much stuff to handle, and that’s just life.  I feel ill-equipped to handle all these things, and I would love to just constantly veg out and numb my brain to anything of real consequence.  Then I feel guilty for doing just that when I give in to those things, because I know deep down, this is not how I want to live and people are depending on me to live differently.  And deep within all of that is the fear that I’m just like my dad, who may or may not have taken his own life.  Yeesh.  No wonder I don’t want to think about that.

 

And somehow through the midst of all this, I’m supposed to be a loving husband to my new wife.  That has it’s own host of challenges, which I’lll save for another time.

To whoever ever read this: thank you.  I remember Terence, and that random person who found my blog and left a comment.  The rest of these words, are just for me.  Let’s get started again.

Surprised by Meaning

I was biking and fell.  I’m scrapped up and bruised.  Beautiful view tho.

I’m reading Surprised By Meaning.  It’s good.  I’m at this point where most of the books I read are recommendations.  Next up would be Brothers Karamazov, but of course, that’s 37 hours on audiobook.  It’ll have to be for another day.

It’s been a while since I wrote on this blog.  I haven’t really thought about it until recently when I showed it to Charlie.  I don’t know.  I feel like whatever I write next must be forced out of me.  I’m also afraid of what it might mean to confront my thoughts head on.  Chief on my mind right now is Meredith.  She recently got back in contact with me, and I found myself thanking God for such an answer to prayer.  There hasn’t been a day that’s gone by that I haven’t whispered her name.

I went to a wedding today.  I thought about the kind of blessing that is, and the blessing I get to experience this community and the closeness of these relationships.  I wish she could share in that joy, instead of feeling sad, as she said she feels.

What do I say to that?  What can I say to that?  How can I help someone not feel sad when they’re 3000 miles away?  A text can only do so much, and even a voice such as mine is limited and cut short.  4 hours can pass without even thinking about it, but it feels like it’s not enough.  I don’t know what to do, and I feel helpless.

But there’s hope.  Recently she opened up about what she believes, about this universe and how it came to be.  There’s option 1, where everything is just random and chance, always here, no causer.  Or option 2, which says it’s not something that’s always been here, through sheer randomness and chance, for if it was, then we would observe a different sort of universe, without a fixed beginning, as Alexander Vilenkin proved it was.  So then the question that allows for options 2 is this: where did the beginning come from?  The whole reason people claimed the universe was eternal was so that they didn’t have to answer the question of who began the universe.  That gets us to option 2, where there’s a source, call it God or whatever you want to call it, and it set the world into motion.  I think that’s where she’s at now.  Not quite at the God of the Bible, but not quite the avoidance of such a God in the cold indifferent eternal universe.  The hope is that through option 2, she can reach option 3, the idea of one God, indwelling Christ as one man through whom all things were created.  The hope is to get to option 3.

But then there’s this guy.  Oh man I hate this guy.  At the same time, I can totally relate to being this guy.  In another life, perhaps we could’ve been friends.  She said he checked out Screwtape Letters after they had their fight.  I wonder if that means he’s on the same track I got onto, explored option 1, option 2, and one day he might come to the same conclusion I came to with option 3.  It’s still a work in progress, but I’m hoping he’s progressing towards my position, which is arguably the more reasonable one.  I don’t know.  I’m supposed to hate this guy, and yet I just feel sorry for him and wish he could see the error of his ways to be saved.

That gave me some hope.  That gave me some encouragement and a way to start the conversation on her grounds.  But days after, she seems cold and far away now, lost in sadness, tragic possibility and a wallowing desire to restore the old narrative.  It’s terrible.  I wish I could tell her what I see.  I wish she’d believe me.

Believe.  That’s an interesting thing.  She asked if I believed her, when she said he was amazing at creating.  Well duh.  Why wouldn’t I?  She would not have bought into the lie of the narrative if he wasn’t compelling for the story.  I’m sure he’s excellent at his craft.  Even the psychologist said so, that he was a genius.  but so what?  What good is genius if it led him to be violent towards those closest to him?  What good is the intellect when pride sours the brain?  I’d rather be dumb.

Alas, such is the problem though.  I’m not dumb.  So there’s always this risk of someone similar being someone I become.  He’s not someone I want to become.  Yet the hope is that he might become as I am, with enough humility to forgo what he thinks he knows, and humbly seek to learn more than what his eyes are limited to.

So that’s where I am, with her.  What’s the solution?  I don’t know.  I think it’s just gotta be risked.  I’ve risked it before, I’ve pushed too far, and gotten too religious, too much.  So the solution is not to go down that route.  It may be to reveal a bit of her own selfishness.  Why does she get to decide when we talk?  Or perhaps more accurately, why do we speak of her burdens and not my own?

Aside from the obvious, it might be a helpful lens that enables her to view her heart.  The complaints of a proud person who seeks to craft a life of her own, to order the universe around her needs as the God and master of her own fate.  I can only hope it’s not cruel to make her attempt known.  I hope she’d forgive me for showing her what I saw all along.  There I go again.  I wish I didn’t see it.  I’d rather be dumb.

But, as I am what I am, I gotta make do with this situation.  I prayed that she’d be well and that she’d find her way to you O Lord, somehow.  I certainly didn’t think you’d want to make that happen by bringing her back towards me and my ilk.  But such is the case.  So now I suppose the solution is to offer a different prayer, that I may find inroads for the gospel, to, as she puts it, weasel the love of God into her heart.  I hope she’ll take it better this time around.

And to address the elephant in the room, of course I like her.  She’s brilliant.  Far too smart not to believe in option 3 eventually.  The thing that’ll stop her will be her emotions, clouding her judgment and swaying her towards the narrative of a fairy tale, the genius savant and the fame-driven life.  How can I get her to where I’m at, to say that all human loves fall short of our deepest desires?  How can I get her to see where, though I like her, she is but dust in the wind as I strain to grasp the real thing besides?  What can I do to keep her from being deceived and devoted to such lies?

Well obviously, it’s not my job to succeed in this endeavor alone.  It’s the job of the Holy Spirit to convict people of their sins, and I leave it up to my sovereign God to be working in the background whether I know it or not.  I entrust her into the prayers I once prayed. and hey, it only took 4 years.  What’s another 4 more?

Alright, time to sleep.  I’ll be teaching Alex and Chris about the historical reliability of the Bible tomorrow.  I should get some rest.  May they be strengthened in their convictions through the material and find adequate reasons to believe.

 

 

December Memory

15 minute prompt – Write about a December memory.

December.
Shopping for Christmas gift with my old friends.

I remember fondly the escalator. As I stepped on, it seemed as if the world began to open up above me, and I found myself clenching my jaw to seem stern and tough. Why is that? Because next to me was megan, the girl you would fall in love with as a preteen boy, but realize that is the only time you can.

We were going to grab gifts for a gift exchange she planned for a group of our friends. I say our friends but they were more like the people she invited and the people I knew the names of. She had begun to grow up into that age where she leaves some friends behind to make other friends to secure her social standing. I suppose I should be grateful she chose to include me in the midst of such esteemed company.

Anyway, so here I am, on this escalator, and what catches my attention is the sameness of it all. Everywhere I look, there are baubles and gadgets and trinkets to explore and, if one mustered up the courage, to move towards those vendors and risk their soliciting. It all feels the same. It felt like a satin sheet was draped over my eyes and I was feeling what I was supposed to feel. What everyone was supposed to feel.

I noticed it. Through some mis-stitched track of the fabric, I noticed it. The difference and the disdain. I hated being here. I hated standing next to her while feeling what I was feeling. It wasn’t real, and it all felt fake, just like the friendship.

I wish I tore back the veil. Instead, up I went, on that escalator, clenching my jaw, hoping that it would all be over soon. I hate shopping. I hate Christmas. All the materialism, and all the anti-materialists talking about all the materialism. I hate it. So what does that make me?

One day this will all fall apart. I won’t walk next to her, I won’t need to clench my jaw, and I won’t need to stand in this suffocating scene. Maybe I could finally breathe, but it wouldn’t be a sigh of relief; no, it would be a sigh that signifies suffering, of being so alone in my disdain, and a sigh that betrays understanding, as everybody knows, but nobody really knows.

I reach the top of the escalator, and glance at her. She’s swinging the bag in her hand, carrying some product that would elicit reactions. Is that the goal then? To grab gifts that elicit reactions? Is that the time of my youth, and is that what had to be fun?

It saddens me to remember this. Even now it feels forced, the melancholy, the nostalgia, or, as Lewis put it, it feels as if I’m trying to rip open that inconsolable secret. It terrifies me. Because think about it: if I could spend 15 minutes and find at least this much, what else is there that might eat me alive?

Peter the Apostle

You’re right, I shouldn’t compare myself to Peter. Peter had to take back his words. I never should have.

John or Peter

Nothing ever works out as I had hoped,
but everything always works out as I expected.

That’s probably why I felt so hurt. Here was hope. Here was me, hoping, that something in my life could work out right. That it wouldn’t have to be the difficult road that it’s always been, that just once, I could have some normalcy, some normal joy.

But sometimes, joy is better when it’s not normal, when it’s a long slog, when it’s unearthed and derived through long suffering. So yes, I suppose I should’ve seen it coming. But seeing it coming doesn’t change much. This life still hurts.

To put it another way, I hoped I was John, and it turns out I was Peter, but maybe it’s better to be Peter, even though he wept bitterly. Peter gets reinstated, and in humbling recognition of himself, he is exalted.

I pray that I may humbly do the same.

25th Hour

– Do what, Mike? What did you do?

– I took the two years.

– No, no, you didn’t.

– Rachel, Rachel, please.

– I don’t accept that.

– Please listen.

– It was the only way that I could–

– No, it wasn’t the only way.

– You told me that you’d wait for the verdict, and I begged you to have faith in yourself, and you told me that you would.

– That was before I begged Diaz to take a deal that would rat out his friend, and he didn’t listen to me– 

– Wait a second. You’re throwing away the next two years of our lives for something that some criminal said? – Just stop.

– Listen to me.

– Hold on. Harvey said he wasn’t gonna let this happen. He went to see the judge, didn’t he?

– It doesn’t matter.  He can’t stop it.

– Why not?

– Because it’s not up to him. It’s up to me, and I’ve made my decision. Rachel, where are you going?

– Anywhere else. Because if you’re gonna rob us of the next two years of our lives, I am not gonna stand here and watch you do it.

– Are you okay?

– No.

– Rachel

– I just don’t understand, Mike. You told me you’d wait for the verdict.

– I know.

– Rachel, listen to me, all right? I didn’t do this to hurt you.

– I did it because it’s who I am.

– I know that.

– Then why are you holding it against me?

– Because I can’t stand the thought of losing you.

– You’re not gonna lose me.

– Yes, I am, Mike, for two years.

– And it could have been seven.

– It could have been zero.

– They took–

– Why couldn’t you just wait for the verdict?

– Because I have to live with myself for the rest of my life.

– I made a decision, and I I can’t go back in time and change it.

– But we are here right now, all right? We have–we have three days left.

– I’m gonna have to take one of those days for myself, Because you promised me that you would have faith in yourself.

And you didn’t.

This is why I make the choices I do.  This is why I harm those who love me.  This is why I can never be anything other than that, the one with the character to self-destruct.

This is why I make my choices.  This is what makes me choose what I do.

This is why I chose her, and her, and her.  It’s who I am.

Even if it hurts me.  Even if it leads me to self-destruct, and to be unhappy.

I gotta do this, I gotta ask the one I like, and I gotta like them for those asinine reasons, and ask the ones who have no chance of accepting.  That’s who I am, the Lord knows it, and he helped me grow through it, which is why he had John ask me, and had me ask them.

I don’t think I would’ve done it differently.  I think I would do it all over again.

It does make wish it went differently though.  It makes me wonder what if I had done it differently. Which makes me realize, I wouldn’t be able to grow, unless it happened the way it did. This is the only way it could’ve turned out, and arguably, I’ll be better for it, in the end.

The Lord is sovereign, and he knows what’s best, he knows what he’s doing.  Humility is to say I am nothing, and to let the Lord be all, in my life.  I can rejoice when others are preferred and I’m disregarded.  I can experience joy when they succeed where I fail.  I can have hope in my Lord, to create in me, blessings beyond my brokenness.

Okay Lord, I’m ready, Do Your Worst.
And, oddly enough, that means Do Your Best.

More words, more uncertainty

I say vulnerable things, but people don’t think I’m really bothered by it, or actually struggling with it, or terribly burdened by it, because I don’t give off that impression as if I can’t handle it, and instead always give off an impression as if I can handle it, or the impression that I’m trying to hide my true self and pain.

 

I think you are vulnerable, but it doesn’t seem like it bothers you.

Most people can’t control their emotions when they’re vulnerable.

“I think your parents killed your emotions”