1-19

I wanted to relate some musings I've had in the last week or two.

I was reading through Mary's Magnificat. We Protestants are usually not familiar with what that is, so I'll tell you that it's the praise Mary gave to God in Luke 1 when Elizabeth told her she was blessed among women because she carried the Savior. Anyway, one of the lines Mary says is, "His mercy is from generation to generation on those who fear Him."

I need to fear the Lord because I've recently felt the need for the Lord's mercy as much as - maybe more than - anybody on earth, so it got me thinking about that word "fear". I've always wondered at the juxtaposition of fear and love. To fear someone cancels out love, because to love someone necessarily means to make yourself vulnurable to them. Obviously, you can't have a fear of being hurt in some way while simultaneously entrusting yourself to them. The Bible itself says that "perfect love casts out all fear", I think because of that very reason. Perfect love = perfect trust = absence of fear. So when confronted with the phrase, "fear God", I've always substituted the word "reverence" for fear, which I've understood to be more to the point of the expression.

My Bible's concordance shed even more light on it for me. "Revernence" was one of the synonyms, but then there was something else. "Tender conscience". Wow. It struck me as a beautiful way of saying it. To fear the Lord means to have a tender conscience toward Him.

I remember being in high school, and some of my buddies would go out drinking, some even got into harder things. Some guys would talk about having sex, and even name names. Then they would lie to their parents about everything. The game was to see how much one could get away with. During that time, one of the things I remember thinking was, "Don't you love your mom and dad?" The answer was, in reality, not so much. I mean, I'm sure all my friends had a kind of a dormant love for good old Mom and Dad, but not an active, engaged, meaningful love. To have truly loved their parents would have meant to have been trust worthy. To have been trust worthy required a fear of their parents - in the sense of having a tender conscience toward them. The trouble was that somewhere around or not long after the time puberty hit they had begun to harden their conscience, so that by age 17 it was just second nature.

So it is with God. To actively love Him means to have a tender conscience toward His wishes, to obey with a willing heart, to be found worthy of His trust. So love and fear are not juxtaposed at all, but synonymous.

Pretty cool.

1-18. Sick and addicted

I'm calling the sickness that is now a week old the Viet Cong Bug. It's ruthless. It tunnels through my sinuses. Ten more of them show up where I thought I killed out the first one. It pokes punji sticks into forebrain and sets off booby-trapped coughing fits in my chest. I escalate the war with the high tech weapons of various pills and syrups, but the enemy just keeps getting stronger. It's becoming a quagmire, and I've become a body divided: half of me wants to pull out of it, but the other half wants to finish the job - restore the health, vigor, and confidence I used to walk with so long ago. I'm considering doing the unthinkable: dropping the A-bomb (Antibiotics). But that would require a cost I'm not sure I'm willing to pay -- a doctor visit. It would also constitute a surrender of sorts -- bringing in mercinary soldiers from a foreign syringe to fight on behalf of my own corporal defense. What would that do to my white blood cells' self image, their belief in their own ability to defend and protect their Body? What happens next time? They throw down their T-cells and run for help at the first sneeze?????

Okay, the previous paragraph is an analogy that got out of hand. Please excuse me, I'm still sick.

Yesterday was a snow day for us. I felt bad anyway, so I did a few negligible tasks around the house, then played computer Scrabble the rest of the day. Literally. About 12 games. I reinforced the understanding that I have an addictive personality. I kept trying to even the score with my computer nemisis -- I call him CompButt -- but kept losing 2 games for every 1 won. What finally made me quit was when my wife popped in and I didn't hear what she said because I was trying to figure out how many points K-A-T-I-E would be worth if I put the K on a triple letter score (18). My name is Eric, and I'm a Srabbleholic.

I better eat my lunch before my next class. My apologies to a couple of you - I've actually tried to post comments on your blogs, but my computer isn't letting me. Don't know what that's about.

Eric

Sick ramblings

I'm sick as a dog today. Why are dogs used as a reference point in that expression? I've seen my dog Kneehi throw up, bounce away to chase a squirrel, and when said squirrel has been thoroughly taught a lessen, return and eat what he left. Dogs are some of the least representative creatures of sickness on the planet. You don't hear them asking their masters to readjust their pillow or take their temperature or change the channel for them. I think the expression should be, "I'm as sick as Uncle Ted today". For those of you who don't know, my uncle Ted is an expert at playing sickness for all it's worth. Just ask his wife.

So, I'm as sick as Uncle Ted today. There's some kind of brain leach sucking at the inside of my forehead, my eyes keep wanting to twist to the right, and my lungs feel like they're trying to inhale that liquid oxygen stuff from The Abyss. You'll forgive me if I'm not making sense -- I can't tell.

You know, another animal used in exactly the wrong expression is the poor misunderstood pig. "I'm sweating like a pig" is terribly inaccurate, because pigs can't sweat. That's why they roll around in mud in hot weather. Some may find that pretty disgusting, but I'd rather fat guys do that in the summer than walk around sweating, making their own gravey.

Sorry. I'm sick, so you'll forgive me.

Okay, time to work, or at least attempt to. Kudos to Erica for the list of alternatives to the name wryspace. I should have gone with Haikuspace (sp?). Except I'd have to make all my entries 5 lines and be really gentle and like to rake rock gardens and be all in harmony with nature and stuff. Yuck. Guyspace - yeah, that's what I should've gone with. Except females would think they aren't allowed to read. That's no good. I'll suppose I'll just stick with having people think I'm funny.

I'm on my lunch break, and decided to do a swan dive into the whole blogging thing. I wonder when the "the whole _____ing thing" thing will pass away. I think it will go the way of the "he's the cat's meow" of the 20s, "far-out" of the 60s, and "radical, dude" of the 80s, but you never know. It could become something like the "cool" of the 70s, and hang on indefinitely. Hope not.

Anyway, I like to do the whole writing thing, a fact which, I have determined, will not be comprimised by the number of humans who like to read me. Oh, who am I kidding? I hope to have a fan base the size of a small Caribbean army by Easter. As long all of you don't expect me to chant "down with the Bourgousie!" or site passages from Che's Autobiography.

I called my blog site wryspace because, to be cute, I was going through all the things that rhyme with "MySpace" and came across the R. I almost went with "RyeSpace", but realized that that particular grain has nothing to do with me, except that I like the occasional Reuben (sp?). That's not enough is it? Then I thought I'd be ultra-cute and change the R to WR, and mislead my fan base into thinking I'm witty enough to deserve it.

So, hi all you fans out there. Actually, my plan is not to try to be funny all the time. Not even most of the time. I think I'm not going to try to be anything at all. The fact is, I love words much more flowing through my fingers than through my mouth, so I think my grand plan is to just write and see what happens.

See you next time. Who am I kidding? See ME next time.