christians and pregnant ladies

It’s a hard thing, a lot of the time I try and rationalize that whole bad thing to good pep thing so that the good person can empathize with someone else. A lot of the time that just feels like a cheap cop out. WOW very tangent, but the MOST PREGNANT woman that I think that I have ever seen before just walked into the coffee shop, it almost looks painful. OK, so back to the main point. I think that something that I have been thinking of lately is that in one of Eldridge’s books he is talking about changing the way that you approach things. Changing the questions that you are asking from something like “Why is this happening?” to “What are you trying to teach me here?” I guess that if you approach the world and its happenings with that question in mind it helps, at least it helped me a little dealing with my own little “demons” funny that I have to put quotes around it to make it less real, it felt really real a couple nights ago. Really though, not why are these things happening?, but where is my lesson, if we are supposed to be growing, which I feel like I am every day, some days by leaps and bounds, but others, baby steps, “small moves Eli” (contact) right?

I don’t know how I feel about that whole effect of your environment on you thing. I guess that part of me is afraid of that idea for Christians to just pull out and become there own little bubble/subculture. Public school is a “dark” place so lets take our kids out and put them into private school. I guess that this also ties into something that I have been struggling with the last week. So its story time.

Last Friday, I went to my friend Kristen’s house in Portland, I had to work at the Air Base the next morning, but I wanted to hang out for a bit. We ended up playing a game that was something like where someone asks a question and everyone responds, than the person who asked the question tries to match the answer to the person. The part that bothered me was that a lot of the questions, or at least a batch of them were political or something along those lines. So one of the questions was what group of people do you dislike the most, I ended up putting down that the group that I dislike the most are Christians, someone else put down “liberals” so than we were assigning the answers and we got to the one about the liberals, one of the other people was like careful guys, we don’t know about Kristin’s roommates, they might be liberal, than they were like well, no one here is liberal right? Partly just because I was upset that the group was trying to be so political, or two faced, (why should we change our answers depending on who is in the room?) I said Ya I am liberal, I don’t even really care what people call me, I don’t think that I would call myself conservative or liberal, I am just matt, I call em like I see em. That is why I put down Christians as my group, because they want to be one way, than another depending on who is in the group. It just kept going that way, something changed in the group dynamics after my little comment.

So now back to the main point from a side rant, we try and hide from anything that takes us out of our comfort zone, its just what people do, not just Christians, but everyone, it’s a scary thing to get out from where your comfortable at. If we hide from everything that challenges us, might we not miss out on some of the things that god wants to use to shape us? How many lessons have we dodged by avoiding conflict? We don’t want to go through the pain. That pain and the suffering shape us, they define who we are and how we live our lives, painful yes, but a painful lesson, and that could be a good thing. “What are you trying to teach me here?” I guess that that is what I just keep holding on to, just keep asking the question, perhaps I might get an answer.


M@
"Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it." ~ Abraham Lincoln