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?