Supermarket Sweep

In recent years, I have found that I am kind of a hog, and I greedily collect things sometimes or order more food than I really need or keep looking for opportunities in a crazed way.  I think some of it could be just some autistic obsession that I should not feel too bad about and should just try to manage as best I can.  But I do think that some hoarding tendencies can be used to pray for people, and you can literally just let yourself mentally be as greedy as humanly possible on everyone else's behalf as you ask God for stuff like health and food and hope and all kinds of other blessings.  I think part of it is the idea behind fasting, where you let yourself be hungry and it fuels prayer.  Even though I don't think God likes greed, when there are 7 billion people to pray for, it might be good to go on an out of control mental shopping spree for everyone.

Curses and Blessings in Disguise

It is confusing to not find love at church but to find it at a school or a group of random work friends, but there is an enemy that God is continually outwitting to save us and some decoys and unexpected resources and even letdowns may be part of a grand plan to bless us under the evil people's noses and to set us a table in the midst of our enemies.

A thorn by any other name

  I read a book about Buddhism once, and it talked about certain strategies to remain detached from things in life as a way of being more immune to loss. It was interesting to find this idea in such a different context from where I had heard it before, which is from Christians who criticize grieving people because they supposedly loved something too much in this world. The Christian judgers suggest that sadness or depression must surely be a form of idolatry and that it exposes a preference of worthless things over God.  The idea is that if people trusted in God instead of things like friends or insurance, then they would barely bat an eyelash when their whole life is ruined or when they were smashed by a steam roller or all their loved ones died.

  But my opinion is that as surely as it is okay to sit on a bench and trust it to hold you up the whole time, then it is okay to depend on both tangible and intangible resources in this world, and especially to love people so much that you would feel devastated for those attachments to even be weakened by a wrong word or a missed appointment, much less a permanent address change, or something horrible like death or disease.
   In fact, I think it is exactly a lazy lack of intense caring that would cause people to do something as mindless and spiritually inferior as telling others that it is better not to love.

Random analogies about suffering

   I am gradually remembering all the surprising things I have learned over the years of trying to stay alive and salvage as much of life and goodness as possible while feeling like I lose stuff faster than I gain it, except weight.  But anyway, one of the things I remember is an analogy that often comes to mind when I think of a very important command to be thankful for what I have and try not to complain.  I have had depression that made it difficult not to complain, and that is one thing to understand, but there is something else that I think is more important to understand, and when I think of it, I think of a certain scenario.  I think of someone sitting on the floor after a magic show or something like that and someone is standing on their hand.  And over all maybe life seems good but they have to cry out and say "Someone is standing on my hand."  And they can't move and leave and live their nice life until the person stops standing on their hand.  It is a very random analogy and not that great and yet I really believe that a lot of people who are told not to complain are in that situation where not only do they have to describe and explain their situation but they are trapped by the problem too. And even though it is kind of simple thing, and maybe even a mistake from someone else, in a way it is truly incapacitating and almost an emergency as much as it is a simple inconvenience.  I do not have real life examples for it, and some abuse situations should not be minimized by a comparison like this.  But this image did not come from nowhere, and when people say something is bothering them, they should be believed.

   The other analogy I think of is how some people expect people to catch a falling piano. I think this is something I think of when people expect people not to be affected by certain things that actually are very difficult situations. Falling pianos are common in the cartoons, and yet many people did not learn.
 Some writers weave analogies into nice writing but I decided to just say this stuff.

This post might not please some people.

    One of the most common teachings from pretty good people is advice to not be a people pleaser.  It is especially frequent for people to remind everyone to only try to please God.  But God told us to serve people, and most of all to love people, and I think when both of these important commands really are priorities and really are being accomplished, then part of it often involves truly wanting to please people as much and as thoroughly as possible.  And usually, if you really love or even like people, you do care about what they think of you and want them to like you back.  If you don't, then you might just be using them to make yourself seem like a charitable person, which I think is close to the opposite of what God wants from us. People will be quick to say that reciprocal love is not the kind of love God was talking about, but some of those people are probably being defensive because the rejection they experience is from complete failure to be even a decent regular human being.