Truth Hurts

"... With that said, I do think you could've made your point without feeling like we were being told 'this is all the ways in which you're falling short.' We can always improve and it's always good to look at areas we need to address, but as the verse says 'rebuke in love'."

I have always had the hardest time with this. I have these two things inside of me that are a bit lethal together: on the one hand, I like to talk. My friend was always telling me to "shut up and sing" when I was the worship leader for our campus fellowship, because inevitably, I'd try to preach about something - it's a cruel irony to put a guy who likes to talk up in front of people with a microphone and then tell him not to (worship leaders are not supposed to talk, they are supposed to lead singing). On the other hand, I like to be right - as in correct. I especially like to be proven right. Together, they tend to get me in trouble.

What usually gets me in trouble is when I want to talk about why I'm right. And God gave me a bit of a brain, so I can usually make it at least sound like I'm right about whatever it is we're talking about (fortunately, God gave me a wife who sees right through it, every time). Sometimes I might even be right. But it seems like it usually ends up hurting somebody. The number of times that somebody has told me "ya could've been a little nicer about it" is a bit too high for me to feel comfortable about it anymore.

The funny thing is, I hate confrontation, which is like pouring lemon juice on somebody's freshly skinned body - it burns like nothing else. Not only do I tell them I'm right, but I duck and cover before they can tell me that I've hurt them. And so I add insult to injury.

The worst part is, the people who tell me that I should've been nicer are the people who always say it in a way that I was so glad that I was mean to them and want to be mean again, just in hopes that they'll tell me as nicely again. It's a problem. This is not to say to those people to stop being nice, by the way - the gift of mercy on someone as clueless as me is a true gift from God.

I'm not sure what to do anymore. I wish that I could learn to shut up and listen more often, and to ask the right questions and have the patience to guide people to a viewpoint that I know has been placed in my mind by God. As the song goes, "are you adding to the noise? Turn off this song!" Telling the hard stuff and being nice about it is a gift I want to learn; God's put enough people in my life who know how to do it well. Hopefully it'll sink in soon.

Split-Brain

Your Brain is 53.33% Female, 46.67% Male

Your brain is a healthy mix of male and female You are both sensitive and savvy Rational and reasonable, you tend to keep level headed But you also tend to wear your heart on your sleeve

What Gender Is Your Brain?

Hope Springs Eternal

Ok. So Terri Schiavo's case is pretty controversial. I'm not really sure why I'm writing something on the subject on my blog, because anyone who knows me will know that the whole situation disgusts me in general. Why we would be contemplating letting someone die without a fight to the end is beyond me, much less by starvation.

That her husband is already in a common-law marriage is suspicious at best. That he is advocating that Terri be left to die, especially of starvation, is a horror above all horrors. I'm married, and I love my wife very much. Were she to ever become, shall we say, less than a joy to have around (say, having to eat via feeding tube), I love her enough to be sitting by her bedside at every chance I got to read to her, smile at her, touch her, and give her hope in any way I could. But he's not - she became a burden and he "moved on", as it were, as soon as he got the chance. Well, at least, just after he got $1.7 million to "take care of her" and then didn't.

I was a bit annoyed, at first, that the government stepped in to the case, because I'm sure that the government has ignored the rights of lots of people in similar situations simply by virtue of the fact that they didn't know those people were IN those situations. But then I read this article and was convinced that what they did was the right thing. For one, they can't hunt down every hopeless human being, they have a lot of things to take care of that involve the greater good. But when something comes to their attention and someone - Terri's parents - beg for their help, this government had the integrity to step in and try. Even if they did fail, it's a sign of their moral integrity that the Bush brothers did what they could to help someone as broken and unable to defend herself as Terri Schiavo.

I worry about this nation. I worry that we've become like Rome - self-serving, egotistical, pluralistic fools who gave up their freedom to follow the desires of their bodies because they didn't care for self-control, virtue, or their fellow human beings enough to bother with responsibility. Yes, that wonderful quote from Spiderman comes to mind - "with great power comes great responsibility." It's the quote that was thrown so often by liberals at the current government in the time of the Iraq crisis, but somehow has gotten lost in the Schiavo case.

We have a responsibility to the lost, the downtrodden, the sick, the elderly, the beaten, the forlorn, the weak, the poor, and the oppressed. That responsibility goes beyond telling them that there is hope - we are to go and do everything we can for them that they might have hope. That they might see how much we care for them so they can see how valuable their lives are, that we might learn from them what it is to be servants. There is a hope worth talking about, but I say we show it to the world - and they will see, and believe.