You shall love your crooked neighbor...

So this semester, so far at least, I've actually had a limited amount of free time, in which I can do things like keep watching Buffy or read a book for fun and not feel guilty about it! That might change in the coming weeks, now that I actually have some tests coming up, choir is starting back, and clinicals are really going to actually start, but we'll see...

I picked up a book I have been thinking about getting for a while now at the bookstore on Wednesday, and finished it yesterday. It's called Looking for Alaska, by John Green, and I thoroughly enjoyed it (though it's probably not for everyone- very realistic high school boy excursions, involving smoking and drinking and such...) The main character in the book is obsessed with people's last words, and the whole book basically revolves around two people's last words.

Simon Bolivar: "How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!" and
Francois Rabelais: "I go to seek a Great Perhaps"

One of the main characters, Alaska, quotes a line from a poem by W.H Auden that says "You shall love your crooked neighbor/ With your crooked heart."

I particularly liked this line because I feel like it kind of sums up our life as Christians. We are just as screwed up as everyone else, but we're called to love everyone else in all their screwed-up-ness just like God loves us in all our screwed-up-ness. We don't love our neighbor as ourselves (or really as God loves us and them...) because we're better and achieved some sort of moral superiority where we can do that better, but because someone has loved us in all our brokenness and we have come to realize that.

With the passing of a Samford student this week, Jim Griffin, the question of suffering, the question of Why a good god let's bad things happen comes up again quite easily. It's one that I had to deal with a lot three years ago when Caroline died. I think ultimately we don't ever get an answer to the Why of our suffering, but instead we must learn to cling to the bigger truth that God sent Jesus, his only Son, to suffer and die on the cross so that we might live. Yes, God allows us to suffer, but he asks nothing of us that he has not asked of himself in much greater quantities. This is the truth that gets us through life, I think. We receive the gift of eternal life even though we have done nothing to merit it because God's son came and died, taking our punishment though he had done nothing to to merit it. And this is the crazy insane truth of our faith. That God would die for us, a people who reject him and spit in his face constantly, because he loves us. He loves his crooked people with his perfect heart. I hope we can better learn to love our crooked neighbors with our crooked hearts until that day when all of our hearts and bodies are made completely new.

I love that Relient K has an 11 minute song. I don't particularly love the fact I have a test next week, but that's life I suppose.

I am anxiously awaiting what the rest of this semester holds. I have no idea what it is, but at least I know someone else is working out all the details, huh? Now I just have to keep remembering that it's by his strength, not my own, that I'm going to get through it.