yet another mommy joke...

when i was six months pregnant with my third child, my three-year old came into the room as i was preparing to get into the shower. she said, "mommy, you are getting fat!" i replied, "yes honey, rmber mommy has a baby growing in her tummy." "i know," she replied, "but what's growing in your butt?"

kids.

The evil in our desire typically does not lie in what we want, but in that we want it too much.

-John Calvin-

The Need for Significance

Our needs as people are really quite simple. Beyond air, water, food and warmth, our only real primal need is to find validation for our existence...or significance. In fact, if a person feels their purpose is valid, they will give up their life for a cause. All our activities are then to gain significance, protect what significance we have, or to hide from others and ourselves our lack of significance.

No person has ever died from a lack of sex...in fact when a person has a higher purpose in their life, they live willingly celibate. Money, power, prestige are all expressions of apparent significance. To be in a loving relationship we gain in our significance to others and they to us. A more mature person comes to realize that our attempts to gain signific- ance from others is futile as we can only be as significant as we are to ourselves...the rest is illusion.

Yet if we do not have any existence beyond our short mortal life, what then validates our being? To be truly significant we need to surrender our significance to a greater calling, a greater being! Christianity teaches us that we do not have the significance within us to approach that being. Rather, God grants us that significance through His grace.

-- Dr. Wayne Coghlan

source: http://jmm.aaa.net.au/articles/9873.htm

concise and well put. but i have one question... how, in everyday life, do you apply that? how is that supposed to affect your work, your choices, your motivation?

hmph.

convenience can be irritating. how do u make a protected post, protected to only certain non xangarian visitors? as such, ive had to make my most recent post private. im just gonna have to remind myself luxury is not a right.

life isnt fair. sometimes we are faced with choices that wouldnt have been there if life was fair. if life was fair, sometimes we'd even find that in some situations, we actually woulda had a choice.

choice. if anything, i now understand a little more of why God allowed us to sin, or choose to sin. sometimes u feel theres nothing worse than feeling robbed of the freedom to choose freely. to be able to choose freely, it is a right. it is a status, an identity, that you are an equal human being. to be created in the image of God also means we have been created with the equal ability to exercise choice.

yet, the context of the same choice can differ so much between two individuals. why should my choice be so difficult? why should my choice have been forcefully chosen for me before i was even faced with it? why should my choice now come with consquences that were not put there by me, no matter which one i choose now? why should i have been robbed of the freedom to choose for myself FREELY?

not being able to exercise your choice freely, is like being robbed. theres just something inherently wrong about it. feels like it just isnt fair. yet still, we are not without choice. how do you choose when u cannot choose freely? how do you choose when you feel unfairly burdened with the unusual consequences that come with the choice?

i made a choice. still felt all this while it wasnt fair. i had suspected that i would see this day, where i could choose yet i couldnt choose freely. many times when it comes back to me, the first thing i feel is that it wasnt fair, that i had to put up with this struggle even. even after making the choice, i had still been let down along the way.

a friend once commended me about the choice i made. never felt that my choice nor character identified with the good things attributed by this friend. but i happened to ponder a lil deeper today about this choice i once made.

there are some things that are absolutes, or facts. 'life isnt fair' is one of them. but in my reflection, i saw another one, which i will not state here. its easier to see the facts that work against us than the facts that dont.

why did i choose the way i did back then? i suppose that when u cant choose freely without having to worry about unusual consequences, you sometimes have to choose painfully. i chose what was seemingly academically correct, and still felt robbed and hurt. i chose to let go of certain promise for the sake of certain interest that is not mine.

but today, i see more. i saw the new fact, with which allowed me to see my choice in a different light. when you cant choose for yourself, you dont just choose painfully, you choose out of love. you choose, for the other person. you choose, the other person. you dont choose things anymore, or for just yourself, you choose people, for their sake.

when i chose, it was the 'correct' choice. i dare not claim any character credit for it, but i see now that the choice was not just 'correct', but right, and better.

perhaps the period of feeling hurt was necessary for me to understand all of this now...

1) the God-given power to choose, is a divine gift, a right even, considering that we are made in the image of God.

so why did God allow us to sin and not stop us from doing it? coz if he did, that would be like robbing us of our status, right, and identity of being created in God's image. we may not have liked it very much at all. it hurts. but more than that,

2) even when we cant choose 'freely', we are free to choose out of love.

we've heard it before that God didnt make us robots but humans so we can choose to love him. that is true, but that's not what i'm about. and i suppose its just about my choosing out of love being the only lesson here, but also that when we do choose out of love, even when it hurts us, we exercise to the very fullest potential this God-given gift of choice. it isnt just a correct choice anymore, its a right choice, a better choice, a higher choice, a choice more reflective of our God-given image.