Symptoms

Lately, I've been sick.  Lying on a couch for 5 days gives one plenty of time to think about stuff.  However, having a fever and lying on a couch for 5 days means that my thoughts consist of "I'm awake, why am I awake?  I want to sleep?  Why did that Neti Pot not work and only made gross tastes come into my mouth?  Can we consider Sandra Bullock the greatest actress of the 21st century?"  So all that said, this may not be the most in depth or thought provoking blog post ever.  But as my dad says, "We want results, not excuses."  So here we go.

I feel like I've been sick a lot lately.  I missed 2 days of school a couple weeks ago, and now I've stayed home a week with this one.  The first time, I just remember my breath smelled and tasted really bad.  I tried everything to stop it.  I brushed my teeth about 5 times that day, and that didn't work.  I would eat food to try and mask my foul odor.  That made it worse.  I tried whitening my teeth.  That just made me feel like a woman.  I tried all this stuff, and none of it worked.

I got pretty desperate.  I didn't want to be around anybody in fear that they would think I was gross or something.

I tried a ton of stuff to try and mask that horrible side-effect, and yet none of it came close to working. 

And we do that so often without realizing it.  People focus on their sin so much and they want to stop being proud, or they want to stop lusting after people, or they want to stop being greedy, or whatever.  So then they work on it.  They try to be humble.  They try to be all that they can be by pounding away at what they're bad at so that they can become good people. 

But what a lot of people don't understand is this:  They aren't fallen because they sin, they sin because they're fallen.  Sin and all that bad stuff is a symptom, not the disease.  Thinking that sin is the disease would be like shoving Kleenex up your nose and saying that you don't have a cold anymore, because your nose isn't dripping anymore.  It's silly.

Rather than change our habits, we need to change our hearts.  We need to stop focusing on what we do, and instead focus on what or who we love.  Where are desires are.  Because until we can point our desires to God, he'll seem like a grumpy old man who gives us rules to keep us from annoying him while he's in his room reading books about science or something while eating salmon and drinking old, expensive wine.  That scenario took me farther than I wanted to go for sure.

But the point of the whole matter is this: Let's get to the root of our issues and focus our desires on God.

And also, does watching chick flicks count as a sickness symptom? 

Leaders

Today, I stayed home from school because I was sick.  And because I have mucus all up in my throat, my breath smells of death.  So it's a good thing that I get to talk without actually having to speak, thus not spreading my black shadow of halitosis.  Hooray for the internet, and too much information.  Anyhow, lately, I've been thinking about leadership.  And because I can't think of any better intro, there you go.  That was my intro.

In "The Lord of the Flies", a bunch of young boys are stranded on an island with no adults, and no way to escape.  They just sit on the beach, argue, hunt, get mad at each other, call each other names, and try to maintain a civilization filled with order.  Despite my description, it's a really cool book for sure. 

So when they get stuck on the island, to maintain order, they have meetings, have rules, and the first thing they do, actually, is elect Ralph as their leader.  The first thing they do is elect a leader.  For some reason, that seems pretty crazy to me.  As long as people are doing what's beneficial to the society of this island, why have a leader?  Why not get water, hunt, or make shelters first?  What's the point of having a leader?

And I think this kind of illustrates some sort of innate drive we as humans have.  For some reason, everyone wants to be led.  Everyone wants a leader.  This is shown in the Bible in Judges when Israel is more wishy-washy than Charlie Brown and goes against what they've come from more often than Brett Favre and LeBron James combined.  They go through these stages of running from God, than running towards God.  In fact, they're said to go through a cycle at all times, consisting of 4 stages.

The 1st stage is apostasy.  Apostasy means a "renunciation of faith: the renunciation of a religious or political belief or allegiance."  So they turn against God.  They decide to worship baal and some other random gods like that. 

The 2nd stage is servitude.  God allows them to be taken over by other nations, and them having to serve and be under that nation.  Then they get sad and go to the third stage.

The 3rd stage is called supplication.  This is the people crying out to God and suddenly realizing the error of their ways and asking God to save them.  He does that by the fourth stage.

The 4th stage is salvation.  God sending a judge over Israel to lead them out of their servitude and misery.

So all that being said, a cycle means that it's repeated, and that cycle is repeated a lot throughout the Bible, like a continuous prodigal son that never actually stops leaving his father after receiving grace.

All that said, you may be wondering what that has to do with Lord of the Flies and leadership.  My point here is that salvation for the Israelites consisted of God sending a judge over Israel to lead them.  He gave them a leader, and that leader would give them freedom.  There's some innate sense in people that they need someone to tell them what to do, they need someone to lead them.

In AP Chem this year, our first lab was extremely hectic.  We had to run aound and use random objects to purify a cup of grease into pure drinking water.  I felt like crying.  But the reason I felt like crying was that we received no instructions from the teachers.  I wanted a procedure, but the procedure never came.  There's an innate need for leadership as humans.

So my question is this:  Why would we have this innate need for leadership if there was no God?  Why would people be born and immediately want to receive instruction from someone on how to live or how to do anything?  I feel like this sense (along with emotions and ethics and morals) requires a creator, because if we came from all-natural causes and all that, needing someone to tell you what to do would be considered a weakness.  You'd be easily manipulated, and a malevolent leader would be able to control you for their own benefit. 

You might say "well, I don't like being told what to do, I do what I want to do and what I need to do, and I don't even listen to stewardesses on airplanes give safety instuction."  And to that I say fantastic.  But that mindset is hard to maintain when you aren't at a good place in you life, it's hard to maintain the self-sufficiency mindset when it seems like you've hit rock bottom.  Desperation calls for a leader, and like it or not, desperation will probably strike all of us at some point, and one will need an escape route.  That escape route can't come from yourself, because you're the reason that you're in desperation at that time, you know? 

So what I'm trying to say is this.  People love being led, and people need to be led.  The only question is what/who is leading you, and my prayer is that you're being led by Jesus, the only leader who can save you.  The only leader who can bring you out of desperation is Jesus.

So those are just my thoughts as of late.