Peanut Butter

Forgive me for being personal for a minute. If you're not interested in my life...I that your own life doesn't hold much interest either or else you wouldn't be spending time on the Internet reading blogs by people in whom you are not interested. (That wording might be a bit confusing but I'm committed to it.)

But yes, now to my point.

These past few months have been difficult ones of self discovery for me. I've touched on this before, so I will skim the surface of this topic by saying that I'm discovering new ways in which my own upbringing and my parents' divorce is affecting my life and my relationships. I've lost two girl-friends because of complicated feelings I couldn't control or understand. And only now am I beginning to face them.

Here's the "inspiring" thought I want to share with you all though. It occurs to me that (shock) I am a fallen person. And while I would like to be perfect and not have these issues, I better just get used to the fact that I have them and continue to live my life. Sure, I'm trying to get better, but there's nothing that says I have to have all my "shiz" together before I am able to love, receive love, and serve in the kingdom of God. Or else I'd be waiting for a while.

And my image of this process is Russel Crowe in Beautiful mind. (If you haven't seen this movie, shame on you, but I'm about to spoil it) But the dude struggles with the fact that he's schizophrenic and he can't get better. No matter what the guy does he can't stop creating people in his mind and believing that they are real. He has long-standing and close relationships with people that exist only in his mind. As you can see, this is a problem. Especially when he's like "hey Gary hold the bottom of this ladder for me"

But after he struggles and fights against it through the whole movie guess what happens at the end? He's still crazy! He didn't get better at all! But he still lives his life. He goes to work, he loves his wife and every time he meets someone new he turns to someone he already knows and says "hey is there another person standing here or is that just my imagination?"

And we're all a little crazy, we're all a little broken. But until we find out the ways in which we are broken we can't go on with our lives because our brokenness will be infecting us unchecked. So instead of acting all surprised and ashamed every time I discover that I've got hangups, addictions, failures, and disappointments I'm going to accept the fact that I was probably going to run into them someday and I'll rejoice that it was sooner rather than later.

Today I talked to a pastor at my church who is very wise but in conversation sometimes strays from the topic. So anyway I was trying to talk about something COMPLETELY unrelated but he hit me with this little gem

"If you're allergic to peanut butter, you'd better KNOW you're allergic to peanut butter, or you're going to die."

Let's save some time and embarrassment for everyone and just admit that we all have allergies we don't know about. And let's rejoice when we discover them because then maybe they wont kill us.