December 23, 2005

I've found in this season of beauty, uglyness has a way of trying to rear it's head, in an especially thorough nature.

Just as you feel God is starting to victory over something, and you think the end of a struggle is forthcoming, the hand of satan surely makes a grab for your mind and what you want to think, despite what your heart would tell you is truth.

It has occured to me that while God speaks to our heart and spirit, satan tries to reach our mind and logic.

What I mean by this is this:
The devil tries to use our doubt and fears, our biases and logic, against us. The devil tries to make us see through logic that what we believe with our hearts is nonsense, that in pure logic, nothing we could believe like God or Christ could be possible.

Here's the funniest part.

I think he's right.

By pure logic and sensical thought, neither of them are possible.

God has made it visible to me that nothing in life worth having is based purely on logic. God Himself, in fact, cannot be easily found through pure logic. To have faith is also not a matter of logic. Faith is more often than not illogical, and though it has been mentioned before, it is becoming more evident as time goes by.

The devil comes back just when you think you've got him down, and he makes a desperate grab for you soul as often as possible.

In my life, this comes in the urge to become a part of something as shallow as letting gossip burrow a hole into my heart and letting it warp how I feel about human beings. It's such a deep scar on humanity at this point that we hardly even give it a second thought now. To talk about someone else and their activities is almost something we're supposed to do.

Except it's not.

I am certain that God wants me not to be selective in who I love, based on what they do in their spare time, or at a party. I'm not above bias, but it's something I want to learn to be beyond caring about. I want God to put me into a state of living in which I love a person despite what others may say about them. I also want to escape the temptation of saying anything about a person, unless it is spritually encouraging.

I feel that the greatest Christmas gift for me this year would be to finally work out the problems I have within myself with those around me. That is a hefty ideal and gift, but I feel that God has the power to get me to that point, if I truly believe it. I want to, at least for the little time that is left, get along well with all of my family, while they're all here. Temper is something that all of us deal with among my house, and one of my daily prayers is that God's grace will get us all past it and help us all, myself at least. I've often thought that more than anything it must be myself that has the worst temper among us, which just means I need His help even more.

How is it that among us, the season that should represent our greatest joy represents some of our greatest depression? How is the season of the Lord's birth turned into a season with the highest suicide rate? How do we face the fact that the day of Christ's birth is becoming viewed more as a nuisance than an actual day of happiness and worship?