Maybe this explains something

I am admittedly a strange mixture of characteristics.  For those who know me, they know I have what appears to be extensive and major trust issues.  (Which I do)  But, I also have this extensive and oddly contrasted faith in  the ability of people to come through when the chips are down. I am a died in the wool people pleaser, and yet very much a loner.  I have excellent "gut feelings"  about people and situations.... and yet continue to make decisions and choices that are seldom what those around me would have me do. 

So, you may ask, where is all of this conflict leading to? 
 Someone I know shared a piece written by J. Mary Luti.   
J. Mary Luti is Visiting Professor of Worship and Preaching at Andover Newton Theological School, and this from her bio is the some total of what I know about this person.  But her comments opened my eyes this morning in a way that I needed to see and hear.

Before we go on, let me mention that I am NOT a cat person, but I understand the anology presented here. 

The story began with the idea that from time to time she would unexpectedly drop in to visit her parents and her mother would always say, "Look what the CAT dragged in"  I grew up hearing the same phrase uttered by my own father.  He used it to explain almost any unexpected sighting of someone you had not seen in a while.  Usually, that person came to visit from "somewhere over yonder."  

This woman went on to detail that cats tend to do things like kill mice or birds and want more than anything to bring them to you as a good will offering of love and companionship.  My dogs have been known to do the same thing, as they know they will get a treat from me if they bring gross stuff to me instead of eating or rolling in it.  But cats also will bring wads of yarn, shiney things, gross batches of yuck that make us want to gag, but THEY are attatched to it. 

She then goes on to use this verse of scripture to tie things together.  "But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near." - Ephesians 2:13 

This is to remind us that each of us who profess to be "in Christ" were are some point one of those bizzare and eclectic finds to Christ.  Maybe we weren't the half dead and bloody mouse, but surely we were each a balled up mess comepletely unable to untangle ourselves.
At some point in time, we were each picked up by the scruff of the neck and dropped into the lap of someone or someoneS who patched us back together or untangled us enough to be functional and productive. 

So, that brings me to ME in all of this.  If you were to find a way to watch a video tape of my family line back for all the generations I have actual word of mouth stories about, you find that somehow we cant help ourselves but to take on balls of twine to untangle.  And you know what the cold hard truth of life is?  You cant untangle a ball of twine, or patch up a broken and bloody bird without touching it.  There are a great number of people out there who don't see life the way I do.  They believe that either, people should just KNOW how to "fix themselves"  OR if you tell them they are a mess, they should just fix it.  That isn't the way it works.  That's why God made us in HIS image.  That's one of the reasons the Trinity exists in the fashion it does.  Relationship. 

What does that mean for me?  It means that sometimes I am going to get my hands dirty, my heart broken, my trust violated.  I can guarantee that to make some of the people around me happy, and to be able to streamline the business of my life, I would love to be different.  There are days I would LOVE to be able to look at the tired, down trodden and messed up people around me and just walk on by... but I know also that to be that person would ultimately not make those same people happy with me either. 

For me, it boils down to this woman's last sentence.  "Having been brought like this from the outside in, how ungrateful we would be to curl up smugly and dream our dreams, while out there so many weird and wonderful treasures wait to be discovered, to be cherished, to be carried proudly home."

If I can make one difference.  Through Christ All Things are Possible. 

Today:

Today is the first day of the rest of your life.

With a new day comes new strength and new thoughts     Eleanor Roosevelt