The Cookie Thief
A woman was waiting at an airport one night,
With several long hours before taking her flight.
She hunted for a book in the airport shop,
Bought a bag of cookies and found a place to drop.
She was engrossed in her book but happened to see,
That the man sitting beside her, was as bold as could be,
He grabbed a cookie from the bag in between,
Which she tried to ignore to avoid a big scene.
So she munched the cookies and watched the clock,
As the gutsy cookie thief diminished her stock.
She was getting more irritated as the minutes ticked by,
Thinking, “If I wasn’t so nice, I would blacken his eye.”
With each cookie she took, he took one too,
When only one was left, she wondered what he would do.
With a smile on his face, and a nervous laugh,
He took the last cookie and broke it in half.
He offered her half, as he ate the other,
She snatched it from him and thought… oooh, brother.
This guy has some nerve and he’s also so rude,
Why he didn’t even show me any gratitude!
She had never known when she had been so galled,
And sighed with relief when her flight was finally called.
She gathered her belongings and headed to the gate,
Refusing to look back at the thieving ingrate.
She boarded the plane, and sank in her seat,
Then she sought her book, which was almost complete.
As she reached in her bag, she gasped with surprise,
There was her bag of cookies, in front of her eyes.
If mine are here, she moaned in despair,
The others were his, and he was trying to share.
Too late to apologize, she realized with much grief,
That she was the rude one, the ingrate, the thief.
How many times have we absolutely known
that something was right,….only to be wrong?
-author unknown

It’s nice to know that others are struggling with the same issues. Perhaps coming up with different answers than I do, but we are different people, with different paths, different histories.

I guess Jon has never had to help patch up a hurting mother, who was hurt by a minister expressing (accurately) the beliefs of our denomination.

I am comforted by the words of Jesus, “Love God with all your heart, all your mind, all your soul, and love your neighbor as yourself.” The words of John, “He who does not love his neighbor cannot love God.”
And the part of the Eastern Orthodox liturgy, “Lord, have mercy, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy.

We want to fix the depression, the grief or the crumbling marriage. Sometimes desperately. But to do so often requires labeling and diagnosing and identifying the “root” problem that needs to be eradicated. And I’m not sure that’s a task we are actually, in general, equipped to do.

Instead, I think a lot about what it means for God (and us) to meet people right there in the grief, the mental illness and broken marriages. Not with formulaic answers or an agenda to fix the problem so the person can get on with “glorifying God”. But “with union” (I don’t know if that is actually the root meaning of the word “communion”, but it’s how I like to think about it.) So that God is glorified in our midst–there in all the ugliness and pain of living in a sin-messed-up world, God in my life means that I can glorify Him in the middle of awful grief, uncertainty, mental illness just like I can in the middle of great physical suffering.

I think I can appreciate the more human/reality aspects of Christian living a bit better (like the stuff I read here by iMonk), including the aspect of living without all the answers (mystery). Which brings me to my point:

G.K. Chesterton said in Orthodoxy that “Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason…. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination…. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain…. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.”

The insanity may rightly be found with those critics of yours who think they have all the theological answers.

Dude, this guy is just not worth your time. (OK — In absolute terms, he is, I am sure, a brother in Christ and in that sense worth more time than we could all give him. But in terms of the value of his opinions to anyone searching for truth, or the effect he is going to have on anyone …) You can forget him and go back to writing more “I Miss You” columns. That’s what helps me.