There’s no puzzling out the will of God, no way no how, the best we can do is to accept it. And that’s a funny thing, because I can feel it changing around me. My life has been on a real downward trajectory ever since I started taking religion seriously. Downward in all of the ways I cared about, before finding God. Money’s worse, health is challenging, friends are fewer, reputation (professionally) isn’t much. And I don’t see much of that changing. I have some hope of selling the house in the spring and going somewhere smaller, but honestly, even that seems a little far fetched. Things are so expensive that I don’t have much hope of getting anything decent, let alone building. If I had no mortgage I could potentially do it myself, but with what time? I can barely futz around with making icons and I’ve got to work enough to make money for groceries, I mean c’mon. Sticking around here is likely the best thing, and once the economy totally implodes I’ll have enough land for a cow and a big garden and I’ll hopefully be able to refinance because that’s the only lever the government has, apparently. At least I’m a benefactor thereof.

There’s a person I know who was dealt a tough hand in life, decades ago now. Abby and I reflect on how they more than anyone could have benefited from the lesson inherent in that kind of tough hand, but they haven’t. 

Accepting the will of God is about seeing the toughness of the hand dealt to you (your cross), and carrying it happily. It’s about looking at that cross and seeing it not as a burden, but as the beautiful lesson that it is, if you can just stop thinking of yourself as the protagonist and start thinking of yourself as the pupil. 

It’s not about being happy because if you just accept things they’ll get better in heaven. That may be true, but really, things can be better here, right now, just by understanding that...it just don’t really matter. The whole world is a big beautiful gift, even the bad bits are things we can learn and grow from, they’re little morality tales hand-wrapped for us by a God that loves us, even if that’s tough to see. 

I mean, man, if Roby were sick, this would be a hard post to reread, maybe that’s because I couldn’t handle it. Who knows. 

In anycase I’m doing my best to see the lesson in how tough things are, I think I’m doing alright at it. Better than I was last year, and better than the year before. et cetera.