Getting my life back

[This is a Part II to the post Putting Our Lives on Hold.]

This weekend will mark my fourth Mother's Day as a mom. It's stunning to think of how much things have changed since that first Mother's Day not that long ago. Three years and two more babies later, I see now that it was the crucible of motherhood that shattered the fragile life philosophy that I learned from the secular world, made me fearlessly seek truth and, ultimately, taught me the true meaning of life. Here are my reflections.


Back when my first child was born, I had a certain amount of angst about being the mother of a baby. It was odd. I loved my son dearly and saw the great importance of shaping another person's life...and yet, there was always this voice in the back of my mind that murmured, "What about my life?" Despite my tremendous love for my child, there was a part of me that felt like I'd hit the pause button on my life the day he was born. The full-time care that babies and toddlers require was so wearying, and I frequently commented to my husband that I couldn't wait until our youngest child went off to elementary school so that I could finally "get my life back!" I felt like there was always a carrot stick hanging in front of my nose, distracting me, promising the glory days to come when I would no longer have little ones around and I could finally get back to really living.

In my mind, the phase of life with babies and toddlers underfoot was drastically different than other phases of life. As I mentioned in my first post on the subject, I assumed that the only way to find fulfillment and meaning in life was to be self-focused. This was the default, the only way to live life to the fullest. Being the mother of little ones was a rare situation in which you were thrust into being temporarily other-focused, and was therefore something to just grit your teeth and endure until it was over and you could get back to the default.

After my second child was born in the midst of painful medical complications, life with little ones got even harder. You'd think that I would have found myself more desperate than ever to move on from this grueling time in my life, and yet, that didn't happen. This was around the time I had started to take a serious look at Christianity, and in the process of reading up on God and what he's revealed to us through his Word and his Church, I started to notice something interesting:

My life as a mother started to make a lot more sense when seen through the teachings of Christianity.

I've said many times before that reading the Christian explanation of why we are here, what we are to do and how we are to live was like reading an articulation of words that had been written on my heart all long -- and this was especially true when it came to motherhood. I increasingly found that my secular, godless worldview offered me no lexicon for describing what was so beautiful about motherhood, and why it was worth it; yet Christianity described it perfectly. I started to find some very interesting answers to that nagging question, "What about my life?"

Christianity was telling me that all those things I yearned for that fueled my self-focused pursuits -- happiness, excitement, security, youthfulness, joy, importance -- were actually yearnings for God, and that I'd never find peace until I sought him. At first that claim sounded crazy, even after I thought it was possible that God might exist. But when I took a hard look at my worldly pre-motherhood life and recalled the travel, the parties, the socializing, the trendy size 8 clothes -- all those things that were supposedly my "real life" that I was so anxious to get back to -- I started to realize something: none of those pursuits ever brought me lasting happiness. In my self-focused life without God there was certainly happiness and joy, yet it was fragile. There was always a feeling of restlessness, a never-ending search for the next big thing. I felt like I couldn't stay still too long, or the happiness might go away.

"OK, I'll bite," I thought after contemplating this for a while. "If I've somehow been groping around for God this whole time and won't be able to truly rest until I find him, how do I go about doing that?"

It was when I got the answer to that question that my entire life -- in particular my life as a mother -- finally made sense.

I discovered that the path to God is the path of agape, of self-giving love. When John wrote in Chapter 4 of his first Epistle, "Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love," he wasn't talking about just any kind of love. I "loved" traveling and sleeping in on weekends and pretty much anything that involved me doing things for me without having to make sacrifices. But that's not the kind of love John was talking about. The kind of love that leads to God, that God is, is agape: self-emptying, other-focused, inconvenient, sometimes-painful love.

When I started to seek God by seeking agape, everything changed. For one thing, the carrot stick disappeared; that siren song of the self-focused glory days to come when I no longer had children in diapers was silenced, the tension gone. My life as a mom of little ones was no longer in such sharp contrast to my future life without young children: either way, I'd be serving others. I found that this was the meaning of life, the secret to lasting happiness, the hidden key that unlocked the mysteries of the spiritual realm that I'd spent my whole life trying to find.

And, ironically, after I came to embrace the idea of a life dedicated to agape, I actually ended up with more time for myself. Because in my secular mindset the other-focusedness of the childbearing years was a temporary situation that you would extricate yourself from as soon as possible, my mentality was to just hold my nose and plow through it. I would have thought that to further embrace selflessness would lead to mental and physical collapse! But what I realized, through Christianity, was that a life of agape is not a life of running yourself ragged. To truly serve God and others to the best of your ability is to humbly accept that you are only human, and that there are limits to what you can do. Using the Rules of Life of religious orders as examples (I once posted the daily schedule of the Missionaries of Charity here), I began to see that it was simply not optional that I regularly find time for rest and prayer. I saw that the other-focused life doesn't mean that you can never take a time for recreation and relaxation -- quite the opposite, in fact. It means that you must regularly take time for recreation and relaxation, but that you put these activities in their proper place, realizing that they're not the meaning of life.

After doing it backwards for so many years, it fit like a glove to live a life that was other-focused for the long term and self-focused in the short term.


As this fourth Mother's Day rolls around and I look at my life with three children in diapers, I find that it's a perfect encapsulation of the mystery of human existence, a testament to that most counterintuitive, most important of all truths: that it is only by going through the discomfort of becoming other-focused that we will find what we're really looking for. To paraphrase the Evangelist John, it is only by knowing agape that we will know God.

I've mentioned before that I'm particularly ill-suited for this job: I'm easily irritated, disorganized, sensitive to noise, introverted, and come from a background of being a spoiled only child where I never had to lift a finger around the house. My daily life is not usually what you would call "pleasurable," at least not in the same way as my pre-kid days. I would almost certainly have reported more days as being overall "fun" or "easy" back when I had a cool career than now. From a secular, self-focused worldview, my life should be worse now than it was before. But it's not. I wouldn't say that "my life is better now," as much as I would say that "my life has started now."

Through Christianity, I understand that that the tension I used to feel about my life as a mother was the tension of resisting God, of fearing that if I emptied myself of ego and selfishness that there'd be nothing there to fill me back up. I finally understand that the life of a mom of little ones is in such sharp contrast to the typical life in our godless, secular culture because it is inherently a life of self-giving love, of being close to God.

The lessons I've learned are objective truths about the human experience, applicable to everyone in every state of life, whether or not they have children. Yet, for me, it took motherhood to teach me these lessons. I am so hard-headed and was so entrenched in my old ways that it took the tidal wave of agape that could only come with a house full of babies to break down layer upon layer of selfishness encrusted with fear, and free me to seek the truth.

Through the beauty of motherhood, I think I now understand what it's all about. And I finally got my life back.

Looking for the tow truck driver

A recent comment I left over at one of my regular reads, A Former Leader's Journey, got me thinking about some of the best advice I've ever received in terms of understanding God's will:


Coming from atheism, the whole concept of there being a personal God who is somehow involved in all that we do was amazing...and intimidating...and confusing. As anyone who has read my 2007 archives knows, for many months I was fascinated with the concept of knowing exactly what God's plans were for all the little details of my life. I looked everywhere for signs: did my invitation to a friend's wedding get lost in the mail because I wasn't supposed to go? Did my computer crash while writing for my blog because God didn't want me to publish that post? Did all the difficulty we had getting to church mean that we should switch parishes? I wanted all the answers NOW, and wanted the world around me to act as a sort of spiritual Ouija board in which God gave me clear Yes's and No's when I asked him questions (that way there'd be no uncertainty and I wouldn't have to mess around with that sticky "childlike trust" thing).

At some point I realized that, unless being a Christian was supposed to make you neurotic, I was probably doing it wrong. So I emailed regular commenter Steve G. and asked him for advice. The details of my question and his answer are here (I highly recommend that you read the whole thing), but the summary is this: I offered him a hypothetical situation in which my car breaks down on the way to an important meeting, and asked how to know the mind of God based on that situation. How do I know if God means the car breaking down to be a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down about the subject matter of my meeting? Or could it be that God is trying to tell me something about my relationship with the person I was planning to meet? Steve G.'s response was not what I expected, not what I was looking for, and not what I wanted. But it was a profound insight, and it changed the way I saw the world. In summary, his answer was:

Maybe it's not about you at all. Maybe it's about the tow truck driver.

He countered with a hypothetical situation in which there is a tow truck driver who is in a bad place in his life and is having a crisis of faith. He takes a call about a woman whose car is broken down on the side of the road. When he gets there he sees a Bible or something on her seat that indicates she's a Christian, strikes up a conversation about faith, and ends up being led back to God through the discussion they have. In other words: I am not the protagonist in that story. I'm just "the Christian woman whose car broke down," a bit player with a small speaking role.

It was this advice that led me to one of the biggest paradigm shifts in my entire conversion: the realization that to be a Christian is not to make God part of your story, but to realize you are part of God's story (that phrasing borrowed from this fascinating post at Purify Your Bride). Up until this point, I would have described my goal as a Christian as "to make God a big part of my story!" To understand that it's not about me, that the story was never mine to being with, was so humbling, so intimidating. What would this mean? How was I supposed to control everything if I didn't even know where God was going with all of this?!

Though Steve G. actually offered the ultimate answer in his response, it took months for it to sink in. I had to learn it on my own, the hard way (as usual), after banging my head against the wall by trying to do it my way a few more times. Eventually I realized that what it means to accept I am part of God's story is to ask in every moment not "What is God trying to tell me with this situation?" but rather, "How can I better know, love and serve God through this situation?" It is to stop reading tea leaves to see what God thinks of all my great, important plans and to realize that my plans are neither great nor important in the grand scheme of things.

Whenever I am tempted to forget this lesson (which is often), whenever I get so mired down in the frustration or difficulty of a situation that I can't imagine how this could possibly be part of God's plan, whenever I get so fixated on my own desires that I fall into thinking of all events in my life as related to them, I remind myself to "look for the tow truck driver." The tow truck driver has become a symbolic reminder for me, a call to put it all in perspective and remember that I have the great honor of being but a small player in the story that God writes. And, sure enough, nine times out of ten when I set my gaze higher and look outside of my own little bubble to see what's going on with the other players on the stage, I find that it is surprisingly obvious that the drama that I find myself in the midst of is actually not about me at all. Indeed, it's usually about the tow truck driver.

Putting our lives on hold

When I first started exploring Christianity, one of the teachings that was most surprising and counter-intuitive to me was the notion that we are called to live other-focused lives.

A product of secular culture, it seemed obvious to me that the way to find fulfillment and meaning in life was to be self-focused (not necessarily selfish, but self-focused). The way I used to see it, serving others was only one of a variety of good and worthy a person might choose to do with his or her free time. By default, you made your life goals based on pursuing personal interests and maximizing comfort; if possible, you would try to find some ways to give back to others, but to do so for any extended period of time would be to put your life on hold.

When I first heard that Christianity taught that our lives are not about ourselves and our own wants, that we are to look to serve God and others before serving ourselves, it was a radically different message than anything I'd ever heard...so radically different, in fact, that it sounded crazy. I resisted it. Wouldn't spending too much time focusing outside of ourselves lead to misery? How were we supposed to accomplish all our big goals and do all those fulfilling things we planned to do if we never optimized around our own desires and wants?

Yet, in the process of resisting this teaching, I began to take a second look at the self-focused philosophy I'd had all my life.

I began to realize that introspecting and focusing on my wants never brought me lasting peace, and that it didn't seem to work for anyone else either. I began to notice that as I started accomplishing some of those big goals that were going to bring me so much fulfillment...I didn't feel as fulfilled as I thought I would. I'd heard before that this Christian teaching about living to serve God and others was not the personal philosophy of the religion's founders, but an objective truth. I'd heard the claim that this, like all the other Christian teachings about moral law and how we are to live, was an articulation of the law that is written onto every human heart by our Creator, a statement of truth about what is best for each individual and for the world as a whole. When I first heard these claims they sounded like so much grandiose religious posturing. Yet more and more I realized that my way wasn't working, and I started to wonder if these Christians might be on to something.

I decided to give it a try. I'd make an effort to spend a whole lot less time searching for meaning and answers within myself, making all my plans for the day, the year, and the rest of my life based on what I felt like doing. Though I would set aside time for prayer and time to myself to recharge my batteries (as religious orders do in their rules of life), I would start to think of my purpose here on earth as nothing more than to serve God and others. Honestly, it kind of sounded like a recipe for misery. But I had learned over and over again that every time I thought I knew better than God and his Church...it turned out that I did not know better than God and his Church. So I gave it a shot.

Almost immediately, I began to see the power of this teaching.

Even with my halting, far-from-perfect efforts, things began to change. For one thing, ironically, I found that everything I sought by focusing on myself and my own needs -- peace, joy, fulfillment, direction, feelings of security about the future -- I began to find only after I stopped looking inward and started looking outward.

The biggest thing I noticed, however, was that to be other-focused is to create an economy of love. Every single time we set our gaze outside of ourselves seek to serve others, whether it's something overt like volunteering at a soup kitchen or something more subtle like simply saying a sincere, kind word to the checker at the grocery store, we add a little bit of love to the world. Through these actions there is more love in the spiritual economy than there was before. The other-focused life is, ultimately, a life of love.


I've been thinking about the power of this teaching a lot lately, noticing how differently I see the world now that I understand that serving God and others is not one of a variety of nice options we might pursue with our free time, but is actually our very purpose for existing.

All of my scattered thoughts on the subject were brought into relief the other day when I had a conversation with an immediate family member (whom I don't want to identify directly). He seemed depressed and uneasy about something, and when I asked him why he said it was about his retirement account. He's deeply distressed that he won't have enough money to afford anything other than a government-run nursing home in his old age. I reminded him that my husband and I would love for him to move in with us when it gets to the point that he doesn't feel comfortable living on his own. We weren't even talking about a situation where he might need intensive medical care, yet he flatly refused to even consider the notion.

"I would never do that to you," he said. "I would never have you put your life on hold like that."

We've had this conversation many times before, yet this time, the first since my conversion to Christianity, I was hit by just what a profoundly sad worldview this reflects. I've always wanted this family member to live with us when he can no longer live on his own, and he's always refused on the same grounds. That part is nothing new. Yet this time I saw clearly that the situation goes beyond an unfortunate refusal of help: it reflects a worldview in which well-meaning people like my relative believe that the best thing they can do for their loved-ones is to not burden them with their presence, where the very meaning of life has been twisted to suck love out of the world.

One of the logical results of the self-focused worldview that is so common in the secular world is that, if we assume that the best use of our lives is the unfettered pursuit of our personal goals and interests, we therefore don't want to get in the way of others doing the same. It creates a situation in which we're all constructing our own little self-sufficient desert islands, not wanting others to get in our way but also not wanting to get in others' way. It leads us to believe that if we were ever to lose our self-sufficiency, our presence would not just be an annoyance but would in fact prevent our loved-ones from fulfilling their very purpose in life.

When I compare my life with the self-focused worldview to my life with the other-focused worldview, the difference is striking. Not that I am anywhere near some saint-like level of always seeking to serve others before myself, but simply understanding that that is the goal, that my own life isn't about me, has changed everything. It's counter-intuitive, it requires sacrifice, and it isn't always the most comfortable path. But it is clear that, truly, this is how we were designed to live. After all these years of trying it my way, it's like I'm finally operating my life according to the instruction manual. And it is ultimately a manual for how to live a life of love, written by he who is Love itself.

Why I love Lent

This weekend I heard a guy on television talking about Tom Brady's amazing life: he's a handsome guy and star NFL quarterback who was on track to have an undefeated season (this was before the game, obviously), not to mention the fact that he's dating the beautiful Victoria's Secret model Giselle. The guy on television talked about how unfathomably amazing Brady's life would be if the Patriots won the Super Bowl. He stared in wonder for a moment as he reflected on this concept. You could practically see the wheels in his mind turning as he pictured walking off the football field from an undefeated season in the NFL, feeling the rain of confetti, hearing the cheers of screaming fans, heading off to spend the evening with his hot celebrity model girlfriend. Clearly, this scenario represented the very pinnacle of the human experience for this man.

Being too tired to do anything more mentally productive, I took a moment to try to think of what my version of a big Super Bowl win would be. I thought back to the days when my life revolved around pursuing things like status and money and comfort, and thought about what it would have been like if I'd achieved more success in that area than I could have ever dreamed.

One result of this thought exercise is that I realized that my dreams were really nerdy (the best I could come up with was imagining my picture on the cover of Forbes where it was announced that Google and Microsoft were in a ruthless public bidding war over some amazing software I wrote). The most interesting result, though, was that I knew exactly how I would have felt if I had achieved all of my worldly ambitions: excited, prideful, honored...and a little bit depressed.

I'd forgotten about this until now, but up until a few years ago, almost every time something exciting or good happened I would feel a tinge of depression. No matter how great or exciting the situation, for some reason I could never quite feel fully happy about it. Just as my happiness would be about to reach a crescendo, something would make it fall flat, like when a singer just barely misses the high note. I didn't generally struggle with depression in this time in my life; it was just that for some odd reason whenever something particularly good occurred, it would trigger a vague sensation of despair somewhere deep down inside. I didn't understand why this happened, but my best guess was that maybe I had some problem with not feeling like I deserved good things, or that I had some issue with depression that I wasn't acknowledging.

Though those two things may have been factors, I don't think they were at the root of the problem. Thinking back on it today, it's clear that something else, a very real, inconvenient truth was there in the back of my mind when I got that promotion, deposited the big paycheck, bought the cool car, moved into the downtown loft, got that amazing Christmas present, traveled to the interesting places, went to the hip parties, landed a big client: this is as good as it gets...but it's not quite good enough.

The fun wasn't fun enough, the luxuries weren't luxurious enough, the excitement wasn't exciting enough to completely smother out that part of my soul that begged for something more. It wasn't that I wasn't grateful -- to the contrary, I regularly felt overwhelmed with gratitude for all the wonderful things in my life -- it's that there was a subtle but present sense of despair that these things weren't doing what they were supposed to do. I was kind of happy. But why wasn't I fully happy, why wasn't I completely at peace, why was I still a little bit restless, even when I technically had it all?

Christians used to ask in wonder about my life as an atheist, "Don't you feel like there's something missing?" To which I would respond by rolling my eyes. In my worldview, the only things humans could possibly need or want were the goals that our species had evolved to need and want, and as long as I had those things or felt certain that I could attain them (which I did), nothing could be missing from my life. I continued to pursue happiness from the possibilities given to me by the material world alone. At some point I came to the realization that the best the world has to offer was probably never going to be good enough; that achieving my wildest dreams , even my own personal version of a Super Bowl win, would make me happy to a certain extent...but not fully. It was a bitter realization.

This is why I love Lent.

For me, Lent is a reminder that what I once thought was the worst news in the world -- that there is nothing in the material universe that was going to bring me the deep happiness I craved -- is actually the best news in the world. To give up worldly pleasures during Lent, things that I once built my life around pursuing, is to put them in their proper place; to disentangle my hopes and dreams from things and fleeting accomplishments; to set my sights much higher.

Lent reminds me to have a healthy amount of awe for one of the greatest mysteries ever seen: that the human animal, who should know of nothing other than the material world at hand, has from the beginning held on to this perplexing notion that what he needs and wants cannot be found in the only world he's ever seen. Almost every culture throughout history, separated by time and space, has come up with this idea. I always wrote that off when I was an atheist, assuming that people just needed stories about fantasy worlds to make themselves feel better. But now that I have discovered God's existence, I get it. This idea won't die because the thirst we feel deep in our souls is real, and the material world offers us only saltwater to quench it. Looking outside the material world, finding God, is to finally find the pure water that fully satisfies the aching thirst.

Lent reminds me not that all the status and comforts and possessions I've pursued are necessarily bad, but that there is Something infinitely better. To quote C.S. Lewis: "All that we call human history -- money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery -- [is] the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy."

I wish you all a blessed and fruitful Lent.


Thanks to A Great Deception for that Lewis quote.

Turning the other cheek

Last month I was walking through a department store and happened to pass a sitting area that had a television tuned to a news channel. Unfortunately, I walked by just as the announcer was recounting something that happened to a four-year-old girl, something so horrific that it made me feel ill (it's the same story I referenced in this post). The little girl lived, but what she went through was truly hell on earth. I continued to think of her hours, days, even weeks after I heard her story. I still think of her every now and then and wonder how she's doing.

Meanwhile, a couple days after I heard this story, someone was really rude to me. The details of how I know this person and what happened don't matter; suffice it to say that my perception was that her actions were not only extremely rude but undeserved, uncharitable, unreasonable, unkind, and just completely out of line. I responded with hostility in the form of defensive sarcasm, and then proceeded to share some uncharitable and unkind opinions of my own about this woman with my husband, mother, mother-in-law and pretty much anyone else who would listen. Somewhere in the back of my mind was the thought that maybe I should be turning the other cheek since I now claim to be a Christian, but that was overshadowed by an indignant feeling that if put into words went something like, "I don't think there's anything wrong with the way I'm responding -- after all, she was SO MEAN and SO UNFAIR. If I'm being nasty here it's ultimately her fault."

A while later, around the time I was walking around composing the "fantasy passive-aggressive email that I would just LOVE to send to this woman" in my head, the little girl from the news came to mind. Completely out of the blue, it occurred to me that one day that little toddler who'd lived through such unthinkable events will grow up. She'll be an adult. Maybe I'll even run into her at the grocery store. I thought of how I would treat her, how I would be sure to show her the utmost kindness to try to add some amount of love to her life, even if it were just in the form of a passing smile. No matter what the premise was for our interaction -- even if she cut me off in traffic or stole my parking spot, even if she were to do something "SO MEAN" or "SO UNFAIR" -- I would respond with charity and forgiveness. I would turn the other cheek.

It was interesting to realize that, just as I was in the midst of very much not turning the other cheek in my current situation. Yet when I thought about some hypothetical future interaction with the little girl from the news, it brought into relief the fact that there would just never be a good reason to be nasty or hostile to her. The severity of the events she'd been through startled me into realizing that any unkind thing I did or said to her, even if it were a reaction to something she'd done first, would just be lashing out because of wounded pride. Not only would it not solve anything, but it would add to the suffering she'd already experienced in her life.

That brought me to my current situation: had the woman who was recently rude to me not suffered? Surely she hadn't been through anything as terrible as the little girl on the news; yet I bet if I were to see a highlight reel of the bad events in her life I would have overwhelming empathy for her too. I bet I wouldn't want to add to the suffering she'd already experienced, no matter what. I bet I'd be willing to turn the other cheek.

I thought of all the other times I'd reacted to unkindness with more unkindness. The combative nurse at my doctor's office, the unhelpful customer service rep at my insurance company, the condescending mom at the playgroup -- I'd been uncharitable and unkind in my reactions to all of these people...yet for all I know they were some of the children whose terrible stories I saw on the news 15 years ago. Maybe I heard of the events in their lives and shook my head in sorrow, wishing that I could do even just one small thing to make their lives better.


Thinking about all this made me realize that I had always mentally compartmentalized people into two different groups: the people who live through horrible tragedy who I hear about on the news, and the people who I interact with in my daily life. The people on the news had almost theoretical status: they were people who I will never actually meet but, if I hypothetically were to meet them, I'd be extra motivated to be as perfectly Christ-like as possible, no matter what, so that I didn't add to the suffering they'd seen in their lives. However, the thinking went, I don't actually know anyone like that.

But of course I do. I might not know many people who have experienced events as extreme as that of the little girl on the news, but everyone has suffered. We all live in this fallen world together, and because of that we have all experienced hurt, loss, cruelty, abuse and pain, to some extent or another. Everyone I'll ever interact with has had something bad happen to them. And when inevitable misunderstandings and altercations arise, if I respond to unkindness with unkindness, to scorn with scorn, the only result is that I am adding to the suffering they experience in this life, and to the total amount of suffering in the world.

Unfortunately, it's very unlikely that I will respond like Christ to all interactions from here on out. I do hope I'm able to keep this lesson in mind, though. I hope that next time I come across some tale of tragedy on the news, when I think, "My God, these sorts of things are so terrible, if only there were something I could do!", I hope I remember that there is some small thing I can do: though I won't ever be able to completely erase all the suffering from the world, I can start by not adding to it.

Why I'm Catholic

I am asked with increasing frequency why I converted to Catholicism as opposed to one of the other Christian denominations. Though this blog is sort of one long conversion story, I've never put together a post summarizing that part of my journey because that subject matter can be a hot (and divisive) topic.

Also, these types of posts are often interpreted to have an implication that people who have had different experiences and have come to different conclusions about religion and God are wrong and therefore not going to be saved. I want to make it really clear that that is not what I believe (nor what the Church believes -- in fact, one of the many things that resonated as true about Catholic teaching is the belief that non-Catholics and non-Christians could also go to heaven).

Anyway, I've decided to go ahead and write about that part of the conversion process, but I want to add a big disclaimer that I'm sharing this in the spirit of telling my story. I am far too concerned about what I see happening in the world today to have any interest in causing division among Christians. We're in this together.

As always, please take this for what it is: the ramblings of some fool with an internet connection. :) Take it (and everything else I write) with a grain of salt.

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My search for God really began in earnest when I started reading up on Christianity. For a couple years I'd been making half-hearted attempts to open my mind to the possibility of God's existence but it never really went anywhere. And then I stumbled across some reasonable Christian writers who laid out a logical case for Jesus having actually existed, the events as described in the New Testament having actually happened, and for Jesus being who he said he was (former atheist Lee Strobel's Case for Christ has a nice, quick summary). Not that these authors "proved" their case irrefutably or that no arguments could be made against them, but they had a much more compelling, evidence-based case than I'd thought they had. I was intrigued.

I decided to see what it meant to be a Christian. Some bad childhood experiences had left me with a bad taste in my mouth about the religion, but I decided to give it my best effort to start fresh, exploring this belief system with an open mind. I bought a copy of the Bible.

Before I even opened the cover, we had a problem.

I wanted to know if the people who did the English translation of this version were said to have been inspired by God as the writers of the original texts were. When I found out the answer was no, I was concerned. Translators have a lot of leeway and can really impact a text. If this book could potentially be the key to people knowing or not knowing God, I was uneasy about reading a 21st century English version of texts that were written in far different cultures thousands of years ago, translated by average people. Could God not have inspired all translators? Though I was concerned, I decided to set the issue aside for the time being and move on.

Somewhere around page two, we had another problem.

I found the creation story fit surprisingly well with what we know of the origin of the universe through science, albeit in symbolic form. I could definitely believe that this was true. I could not, however, believe that it was a journalistic style account of events, like something you'd read in the newspaper. So I immediately needed to know: is it required of Christians to believe that Genesis is to be taken literally? I asked people and looked around online, and quickly found that there was not unanimous agreement on this. I found people who laid out a pretty good case that, yes, it is required of Christians to believe that Genesis is a literal, blow-by-blow description of events that happened about 6,000 years ago; yet others made a good case that Christians should believe that it is truth conveyed through symbolism. I really couldn't tell who I should believe.

I decided to move on and get to what I really wanted to know about: the Christian moral code. One of the things that had originally piqued my interest in religion in the first place was the fact that humans throughout history have all had this same sense that objective truth exists, what is "right" and "wrong" is not subjective. Also, I had begun to feel confused and lost when I looked at the world around me. This was around the time of the Terri Schiavo controversy, and when I tried to weigh issues like that, as well as the other big ethical dilemmas like human cloning, research on embryos, etc. I just felt sad and adrift. I really didn't know what was right or wrong, yet I had this vague sense that a true "right" answer must be out there somewhere. If there was a God, surely he had opinions about these things. And surely he could guide me to find them.

So I picked the Bible back up and continued reading.

One example of the type of answers I was searching for was what Christianity had to say about abortion. At the time I considered myself staunchly "pro-choice", yet something had started to nag at me about that position. I felt uneasy about the whole thing, and wanted to know if Christianity said that God is OK with abortion or not. I read through the New Testament (eventually reading it cover to cover), and couldn't find much. I kept instinctively flipping to the last page for some sort of answer key. How was I supposed to find the part where God tells us what he thinks about terminating pregnancies? Someone recommended that I get a concordance. I was happy to do that, but it felt strange: in order to know how to live as a Christian you need a Bible and a concordance? And were the writers of the concordance inspired? What if they missed something big or made a mistake?

I wasn't coming up with much so I Googled around to see what Christians had to say about it. And I found as many different opinions as I found people, everyone offering Bible verses to back up their claims. Each person stated their interpretation confidently as a fact -- yet they contradicted one another. When I looked up the verses they cited in my own Bible, sometimes I felt they were right-on, other times I felt they were taken out of context, and other times I didn't even know what the context was (e.g. some Old Testament verses where I just had no idea what was going on).

What frequently happened when I was looking for Biblical answers to my ethical dilemmas was that I'd read two contradictory opinions from two different Christians. I'd decide that Christian #1 made the best case based on Scripture, so I had my answer. But then Christian #2 would come back with a new verse that I'd never seen before that shed new light on it, and then I'd think his case must be the right one. And then Christian #1 would come up with yet another verse and I'd think he had the right answer. And then...well, you get the idea. It seemed that in order to form my own opinion about any of these issues I'd have to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the Bible to make sure I didn't miss anything.

So I started reading. I decided to skip ahead to the New Testament since that's where Jesus comes in. And, as with the Old Testament, we quickly had a problem. Here is a sort of sample discussion I'd have with whatever Christian I could find to pester with questions:

ME: Ack! I just read this part in the New Testament where Jesus tells some rich dude he has to give away all his stuff! If I decide this Christianity thing is true am I going to have to give away all my stuff?! [Worried glace at brand new Dell Inspiron laptop.]

FRIEND: Hah! No, don't worry, Jesus was just talking to that one guy.

ME: Where does it say that? Does he later clarify that that instruction was only for that one guy?

FRIEND: No, but that's clearly how he meant it.

ME: That's not clear to me. Anyway, there's this part where he tells this woman Martha that her sister Mary did the right thing by putting Jesus before trivial stuff. Was that only a lesson for her?

CHRISTIAN: No, that's a lesson for all of us.

ME: [Flipping to last page to look for answer key.] Where is that clarified?

This usually ended with my Christian acquaintances telling me to let the Holy Spirit guide me (and probably making a mental note to find less annoying friends). Even though I wasn't sure I believed in God, I had been praying through this whole process. So I prayed for guidance. I asked God to lead me to the right conclusion about all these questions, to speak to me through Scripture about everything from abortion and experimentation on human embryos to whether or not I needed to give away all my stuff.

After a while of praying, reading the Bible, and visiting some churches, I felt like I had some conclusions. I decided that a good Biblical case could be made for "a woman's right to choose" (as I thought of it then), that I didn't need to give away all my stuff, that it was probably OK to experiment on embryos if it was for curing diseases, etc. I'd felt led to these conclusions, presumably by God, and had found some scriptures that would seem to support them.

But something didn't feel right.

As I continued thinking and praying about whether or not I'd come to the right conclusions about what God wants for us, I realized what the problem was, the reason I couldn't relax: I couldn't trust myself. You have to understand, I am a seriously sinful, selfish person. I realized that my self-serving nature severely clouded my ability to be confident in my interpretation Scripture. I had some pretty passionate opinions about all of these issues, and it was so hard to tell what was leading me to my conclusions. Was my decision that the Bible would be OK with me continuing in my comfy American lifestyle led by the "Holy Spirit" or "Jen's seriously deep desire not to give away all her stuff"? I couldn't tell.

My confusion about all of this made me wonder how people who are severely unintelligent could use the Bible as their guide. I'm probably in the middle of the Bell curve on intelligence, and I was really struggling. For that matter, what about the illiterate? Widespread literacy is a relatively recent phenomenon, yet people who couldn't read couldn't use the Bible as their guide. They'd have to go through another, fallible person, which seemed dangerous.

Taking all of this as a whole, the writing was on the wall, so to speak. Christianity did not seem to be the path to God, if he even did exist. At least not for me. I just couldn't trust myself to to get it right. I felt as adrift as ever in terms of the big ethical questions of our day. Though I thought I might have "experienced" God or the Holy Spirit or something from outside the material world a few times in my exploration, using the Christian holy book to find out how God would want me to live was just not working. I was leaning towards moving on to the next religion, seeking God through some other belief system. I prayed for guidance.


Around this time someone told me that one of the Christian denominations claimed that God did leave us this "answer key" I'd been yearning for. I found out that the Catholic Church claimed to be a sort of divinely-guided Supreme Court, that God guided this Church to be inerrant in its official proclamations about what is right and wrong, how to interpret the Bible, how to know Jesus Christ, and all other questions of God and what he wants us to do. I heard that it claims that God speaks to us through sacred Scripture and through the sacred Tradition of his living Church.

That got my attention.

Clearly there was a need for this. Surely I was not the only person to ever feel lost in the world, unable to trust myself to objectively interpret the Bible to discern what God wants from us, unable to clearly tell which of my conclusions about right and wrong were guided by the Holy Spirit and which were guided by deeply-rooted selfishness (or perhaps something worse).

Now, obviously I wasn't going to become Catholic. I mean, the Catholic Church is weird and antiquated and sometimes the people in it do seriously bad stuff. But I was interested to at least explore this line of thinking and see what I found.

I could have never, ever imagined what I'd find. Reading the Catechism of the Catholic Church was like nothing I'd ever experienced. This was truth. I knew it. I'd finally found it. It described God, our relationship to him, the Bible, Jesus, moral truths -- the entire human experience -- in a way that resonated on a deep level.

When I started living my life according to Catholic teaching the proof was, as they say, in the pudding. It worked. It worked better than I could have ever guessed it would. And since I've been able to receive what they say is really the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, my soul, my entire life, has changed profoundly. But that is whole separate story (and, really, the main subject of this blog). To summarize my experience, I leave you with a quote from G.K. Chesterton, writing about why he converted to orthodox Catholicism:

I do it because the [Catholic Church] has not merely told this truth or that truth, but has revealed itself as a truth-telling thing. All other philosophies say the things that plainly seem to be true; only this philosophy has again and again said the thing that does not seem to be true, but is true. Alone of all creeds it is convincing where it is not attractive; it turns out to be right, like my father in the garden.

My thoughts exactly.

Again, I share this not to cause division, but for the same reason anyone talks about anything they love -- that mysterious desire we all have to shout from the rooftops about the things that we find to be profound, beautiful, and true.


RELATED POSTS: On having proof; Love and conversion

Did Mary have days like this?

Sarah has a great article up at CatholicDaily.org where she asks, "Did Mary have days like this?" Not only was it refreshing to hear that someone else was having one of those days, but I'm thrilled to add the word "Toddler-tron" to my vocabulary. She writes:

I don't have a good excuse. No sudden death, news of great tragedy, or personal fall-through. The clock just met 4:00, Toddler-tron started with her customary late afternoon ranting, and it all unraveled from there. Somehow, the everyday things - the weight of my worries, the onslaught of my duties, the trial of just getting through the rest of the day - were more than I could handle.

Ooooh yeah. For me it was getting caught in a sudden rainstorm with a cart full of kids and groceries, a cashier who forgot to scan a coupon, and a teething baby who finds yelling to be the most efficient way to communicate these days, but yeah -- I'm right there with her.

Except for when it comes to how to handle that sort of situation.

Sarah tried the interesting technique of turning to prayer. I, on the other hand, went for my standard coping mechanism of having an imaginary conversation in my head with my husband where I dumped all the details of my rotten day to him, including an aside with my conspiracy theory regarding the forgotten coupon.

So how did Sarah's technique work out? She writes:

Then, on my drive home, I remembered that I didn't finish my rosary this morning. I felt myself calming down as I worked my way through the last four mysteries. It was like someone was hugging me, holding me, comforting me. There's no doubt in my mind who that was.

Oddly enough, my technique of narrating every moment of my frustration during my imaginary conversation with my husband in my head did not produce such fruits. Once I started that ball rolling, it picked up speed. And for the next hour or so every little thing just seemed so irritating.

It actually occurred to me at one point to turn to God, to use this as an opportunity to seek his will at every moment (as I've been trying to do lately). I thought for a brief moment about what, theoretically, God would want me to do in this situation, and shrugged when I came up with nothing. The baby was crying again and I had to get her in out of the rain.

What I did not do at any point, however, was to stop and pray. Not even for five seconds. Once again, I was trying to rely on myself. I turned inward to come up with the knowledge of what I should be thinking or doing to get through this situation gracefully. I elbowed God aside while I tried to recall what I'd read about how I was supposed to be following his will.

Sarah's post helps me realize that what I should have done is stop, even for just a second, to humble myself before God and open myself to his help. To turn towards God through prayer, instead of taking a step away from him and withdrawing into myself.

Sarah offers some great thoughts on this:

Could it be that days like this are just part of the human condition? Could it be that Screwtape and his band of tempters are hard at work to make perfectly good days look like days like this, just to get us to slip up, maybe strangle our kid (oh, I came so close!) or yell at our spouse or take a step back away from God? And you know, once you've taken that first step, however small, what's another one? And really, who needs God and all his restrictions anyway? Who needs the laws and the parameters and all that hooey?

Those last few sentences about those small steps we take away from God are an eerily accurate description of what I've experienced throughout my spiritual journey. It is so easy to let bad habits build on one another. "Small" things like being short with my children or husband on the grounds that I'm having a tough day lay fertile ground for more self-centeredness. As Sarah writes, what's one more little step?

So this is going to be my latest challenge as I bumblingly learn to seek God's will at each moment: when those frustrating moments come up, stop (actually, physically stop) and turn to God. Don't try to intellectually analyze what it was the Church Fathers wrote about seeking God's will or what that latest book by Pope Benedict said on the subject. Just pray.

How lucky we are

I've been pondering the topic of gratitude lately. In particular, I've been thinking a lot about my lack thereof. For example, when I was telling my husband about Heather's story as I wiped tears from my eyes, I almost made the statement, "It makes you realize how lucky we are, how very small our problems are." But I stopped just short of saying it, since I've come to see lately that that's not true. Whenever I make statements like that I always realize how astoundingly wonderful and easy my life is...for about two minutes. And then I promptly go back to grousing around about things like the barking dog next door and the huge mess I have to clean up in the kitchen.

So anyway, an incident occurred last night that was the last straw. I really need to work on this area of my life. It's such a staggering example of just how much people can take for granted that I just have to share for your amusement and pity: some outstanding bills at our business got settled, and my husband came home with a stack of checks for me to endorse. None of the checks were for huge amounts ($26 here, $8 there), but they were made payable to us nevertheless. I was exhausted and eager to get into bed, and after the first few I started huffing and puffing and rolling my eyes at what an inconvenience this was.

Complaining. About. Receiving. Money. Yes, folks, evidently I can complain about anything.

So, expect to read more on this topic over the next few months. My goal is to actually internalize and appreciate the beauty and blessing that are all around me, instead of making fleeting comments like "makes you realize how small our problems are" while actually spending much of my time fixating on said small problems.

After some prayer on this topic I feel like I was directed to the Litany of Humility, so I'm going to start there, but am open to any suggestions anyone has. Also, am I the only one who ever does stuff like this? What is the craziest thing you've ever been ungrateful for? :)

The tragedy of a meaningless life

In light of the interesting discussion going on about my last post, I wanted to throw out this quote (via Melanie) to hear what you all think about it:

Millions all around us are living the tragedy of meaningless life, the "life" of spiritual death. That is what makes our society most radically different from every society in history: not that it can fly to the moon, enfranchise more voters, have the grossest national product, conquer disease, or even blow up the entire planet, but that it does not know why it exists.

--Peter Kreeft, Heaven: The Heart's Deepest Longing

I think this is exactly right, especially in the segments of society that have taken great pains to unmoor themselves from America's Christian roots. I'm currently working on a consulting project that puts me in touch with a lot of the big secular self-help authors and their ideas. And what I see frequently are very sincere, well-meaning people who are often just...flailing.

They're trying to lead people to some vague sense of happiness through the self, through introspection ad nauseaum and asking what you think and what you want and who you are, and it just always falls flat. At best this sort of advice leads to a fleeting, surface-level happiness; at worst it's a total waste of time. It's been interesting to me to see how even these people, many of whom are quite brilliant and putting forth their best efforts, simply cannot lead people to happiness -- and certainly not to peace -- without a higher purpose that comes from something outside of us, without God.


Anyway, I promised myself I was getting offline for the night about 30 minutes ago, so enough from me. What do you think?

The Christian meaning of human suffering

While reading the comments to the last post, I was trying to come up with a good explanation of how I've come to understand suffering from the Catholic perspective. But I couldn't quite put together a non-rambling summary of my thoughts. Steve G. said well what I was trying to say:

Putting aside the issues of persecution for a moment, and agreeing wholeheartedly that 'seeking' suffering is basically perverse, I think something is being badly missed here.

Regardless of whether we seek it out or not, suffering will find us. We all encounter it to differing extents. That's a fact.

The question then becomes how will we handle it? What shall we do with it? Shall we 'embrace' it; offer it up as our sacrifice...as a prayer, try at least to bring something good out of it even as we struggle to rid ourselves of it? Or shall we become embittered by it, angry, resentful?

Mr. Teresa is taking some hits here, but to understand what she was saying, one must understand what the Church says. That God does not bring about evil, but that he can bring good even out of evil.

While Jesus' mission surely was about alleviating suffering, about healing, restoring, etc., to miss that the most essential part of the gospel revolves around a profoundly evil act, and immense suffering is to miss the point. The point that out of and despite that evil and suffering, something profoundly beautiful is revealed...the resurrection.

Jesus most certainly embraces, offers up, or whatever catch phrase we choose, his suffering. There is no way around it. But he did so that the greater good might be accomplished. That death might be conquered and our fear and cowardice at giving up our selfishness (sacrificing our selfish desires) might be overcome.

One of the horrible things about pain and suffering is that the natural reaction is to allow it to consume us, to turn ourselves inward and become self-centered. And that's normal, and from a purely human perspective it's even something that one can hardly be faulted for.

But if we can but lift our gaze from our pain, we might see the path forward. That it need not consume us, that even poverty need not make us bitter, angry or resentful. That was what Mr. Teresa preached. That is what the Church does and always has proclaimed. That even in a fallen, seemingly irredeemable world, that redemption does exist, that redemption is possible.

Back when the subject of God and suffering first came up on this blog, a reader recommended that I check out John Paul II's letter on the Christian meaning of human suffering, Salvifici Doloris. It took me about a month to get through the whole thing and absorb it all. Especially that I was still struggling to understand very basic Christian and Catholic concepts, there were many paragraphs that I had to read about five times before it sunk in. (That said, it's an excellent read. Really worth the effort.)

After I finally got through it, I kept coming back to one simple line the late pope quoted that summed the whole thing up. Of all the 15,000+ words JPII devoted to the subject, the countless discussions that have been had on this subject throughout the ages, one quote from Jesus in the book of John summarizes with simple elegance the Christian view on suffering: "In the world you have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world."

A truce?

So I've been thinking this afternoon about how markedly the tone of the site has changed in such a short time. Just the other day Mike J commented about what a great community we have here, and now it seems that the vibe has really gone downhill. I think anyone would agree that the debates we had in these posts had a far different tone than the ones we've been having in the past two posts.

While reading through the comments that have been rolling in to my past couple of posts I had all sorts of grand retorts laid out in my head, usually reading something like, "You wanna call me prideful?! Yeah, well, YOU SUCK!" though usually with a little less elegance and charity.

As I hit delete on a particularly troll-ish comment I muttered jokingly, "I swear, these people would crucify me if they could." Ooooooh yeah. You know, that actually happened to Someone a long time ago. And here I sit, telling myself that these days I am one of his servants, getting indignant and expecting better treatment than he himself received. Upon reviewing my offending post and the internal dialogue I heard when reading the comments, I had to ask myself if my motive here was the glory of God or the glory of myself? Was my goal to bring more souls to Christ or bring more readers to Jen's blog?

Even worse, I was part of the cause of all this hostility. While I attempted to make the post about pride and atheism mostly about myself and what I was like before I believed, I did throw in a little dig at others while I was at it. If I want to have an open dialogue with atheists, which I really do, I'm not setting the tone very well by making sideways comments and assuming the worst motives on the part of those who disagree with me.

And the cherry on the cake of all the absurdity is that I really feel a strong kinship with my atheist brothers and sisters. One thing my lifelong Christian readers probably can't relate to is the treatment you receive from so-called Christians when you're an atheist and you discuss your beliefs. I could tell story after story of mean, hurtful things done and said to me by people who claimed to follow Christ -- so I of all people should know to tread lightly when discussing atheists and their beliefs. I'm sure they've been called Satan-worshipers and hellbound jerks enough times that they're getting weary.

I had another post typed up with new rules for commenting on my site. Rather, I would like to propose a truce. I was lamenting the loss of the great community of atheists and Christians alike that we had here, pondering which new commenter should be censored, I realized that it is myself who should be censored first. To all the people I called out as pots in my post about pride, I would like to introduce myself, the kettle.

One thing I will say is that despite the hostility the commenters here still seem to be really intelligent, with many insights to offer. Let's start over. I am sincerely sorry for the offense that I caused. Especially as a former atheist, it's really hypocritical. Can we go on from this point forward with a more calm, charitable tone towards one another?

Also, immediately after I hit Publish on this I'm going to say a rosary. My intention is for all my atheist readers: Mike J; Jerret; R and all; Rhinoqlous; Darwin's Dagger; Anon the Catholic-turned-atheist; Anon whose religious beliefs almost led him to a mental breakdown; Anon (the non-atheist) whom I offended so; all the other anonymous commenters. And especially Professor Chaos, whose story of begging God for help that he never received brings tears to my eyes every time I think about it.

My prayer is that you will forgive me, and be patient with me as I work to overcome my lifelong habit of self-centeredness and pride. And that you may find peace, wherever your search may lead you.

An update on bad moods

An update to my post from Thursday about my terrible mood:

Being in the bad mood that I was, I had convinced myself that the tone of the comments was going to be, "Gee, I can't really relate to that. I mean, how could you not feel grateful for all your many blessings, even for a moment? I've never experienced that so I can't offer any helpful advice."

So when the first few comments rolled in with people saying that they go through the same thing sometimes, I felt a lot better almost immediately. And then of course the advice was helpful too.

It got me thinking about how often I'm miffed at other people. It's rare that I'm as low as I felt last week, but on a near hourly basis someone does something to annoy me. So I've decided that from now on, when I catch myself feeling annoyed at someone and start that inner dialogue of, "How could he/she do something so stupid/annoying/thoughtless..." I must first pause and name something that I do that others might find irritating. Today is Day 1 of this new policy and it's been surprisingly humbling.

Also, here is the Abandonment Prayer I mentioned in that post. Our RCIA director has asked us to memorize it. He said it was a great help to him when he was making the difficult transition from being a drug addict and dealer living on the streets to a devout Catholic.

Father,

I abandon myself into your hands;
do with me what you will.
Whatever you may do, I thank you:
I am ready for all, I accept all.
Let only your will be done in me,
and in all your creatures --
I wish no more than this, O Lord.

Into your hands I commend my soul;
I offer it to you with all the love of my heart,
for I love you Lord,
and so need to give myself,
to surrender myself into your hands,
without reserve,
and with boundless confidence,
for you are my Father.

It is hard to say this and mean it. (At the part about "I am ready for all, I accept all," I instinctively through in a few caveats.) But when I can force myself to shut up long enough to say it, it helps.

Turning it over to God

So I'm in a horrible mood today. We're spending the weekend at my mother-in-law's house and I'm worn out from traveling with two little kids and just grouchy in general. It's one of those days where I just woke up on the wrong side of the bed. A couple little things irritated me this morning and put me in an even worse mood and I've been sitting here stewing about all that is wrong with the world ever since.

I actually have a moment alone since the kids are out with my husband and his mother, so I took the opportunity to reflect and see how I can push through this funk. I tried praying, but it came out more as whining in God's general direction ("Lord, did you see what So-and-so did to me?! That was so rude! Aren't they just awful?! Look at what a bad person they are!")

I realized that I was not going to pull myself out of this downward spiral of negativity, and I thought of the advice I recently heard that you can not do this sort of thing alone. We must have God's help in order to be the people we need to be. So I pulled out the Abandonment Prayer that our RCIA director gave us and said that. As I read the part about abandoning myself to God's will I thought, "Yes, this is what I need to do! I really mean that!...But how on earth do you do that?"

Once again, I am hung up on technicalities. I have no idea how one goes about abandoning oneself to God. Should I fall to my knees and pray continuously until the kids get back? Should I pray a rosary? Should I ask myself what Jesus would do in this situation and do only that? (I am going to re-name this site The Stupid Questions blog).

I don't have much more time to write since everyone is about to get back, but I throw this out to you guys: what do you do when you're in a horrible mood, feeling easily irritated by everyone and everything and grateful for almost nothing, and simply cannot pull out of it on your own?

Little lies

A couple weeks ago in our RCIA class our instructor was telling us a funny story about his family. At one point in the story he mentioned that he wanted a snack at McDonalds but knew his wife wouldn't approve since she was cooking dinner. At the prospect of just getting a small order of fries and telling her he forgot she was cooking he said, "Obviously I couldn't lie like that," and continued on with his story.

Outwardly I nodded in agreement, but the thought popped into my head, "Well, 'lie' is an awfully strong word. It wouldn't be THAT big of a deal, especially if you still ate dinner. Those sorts of things are just little 'lies'. Nothing worth getting hung up on."

I tried to get back into listening to his highly entertaining story but I kept getting distracted by the issue of whether or not that fries situation would really be a 'lie'. I was so irritated with myself, I didn't even want to be thinking about this stupid issue. It's no big deal to just, you know, be like 99.5% honest about little things that don't matter. Now what was he saying about that hilarious vacation to New Mexico...?

But it didn't work. I tried to move on but I kept coming back to this issue. Finally, the next day, I decided that I might as well really think through it since something was obviously nagging at me. Though it still seemed like our instructor was being a bit uptight I realized that he was technically right to not tell lies, even if it's about little things. I also realized that this is a clear requirement of being Christ-like. As the perfect being Jesus Christ would not have lied about anything, ever, so if you're going to imitate him you must speak the truth in all matters, big and little.

So last week I decided that from now on I will attempt to be 100% honest in all my dealings. No problem, I thought. I'm a really honest person. I'd never lie about