I think I have to stop reading Dilbert. I read it almost every day, and lately it’s been making me angry. Today I figured out why…it’s because I TOTALLY RELATE to him. And instead of being a comfort, it gives me a sense of complete hopelessness that things are never going to change for me.
I need a comic that appeals to my dry and sarcastic sense of humor and still gives me hope for the future. Any suggestions?
After much consideration, I have decided to withdraw my membership from one of the largest weight-loss megacenters in the industry. I personally think that Weight Watchers is the best way to re-learn (or for many people, learn for the first time) proper nutrition, portion control, exercise, and developing a healthy lifestyle. I am far from perfecting the healthy lifestyle thing, and I am far from my “goal weight.” However, I feel that I have learned the basics, and I can implement them on a daily basis without paying $40 a month to go step on a scale.
I believe that we all need support. I believe the statistics that people who go to meetings lose more weight and keep it off longer. I had almost convinced myself that I would be willing to pay $40 a month for the rest of my life so I would have that community. But the truth is, that’s not really the community I need any more. I need people who believe, and can say in public, that God is sovereign, that he can and has already delivered us from our infirmities, and there is hope in Jesus. I have that community through my local church and to a much larger extent, the entire Body of Christ. I also have a great cloud of witnesses rooting me on.
I believe God cares about weight loss, because he cares for me and all his kids, and being overweight is causing lots of physical and emotional problems. Not to mention I am not treating my body the way I should, knowing that it is a temple and the Holy Spirit lives there.
I know I am not alone. It’s up to me to find the support I need. And it’s up to me to renew my mind daily and not focus on myself so much that weight loss becomes the end all and be all of my existence. The truth is, the more I obsess over it, the worse off I am. When I just focus on my daily routine, which includes eating healthy and exercising, I’m okay.
I’m learning that healthy living is hard work. You have to do pay attention to it. It’s more than eating. It’s taking care of your household. Keeping up with your finances. Developing healthy relationships. Keeping short accounts with God, and worshiping him in all things.
So even though it’s a little scary letting go of my security blanket, I think I’m ready.
You Are 75% Burned Out |
 You are very burned out.You need a huge break from your responsibilities, starting as soon as possible. And you need this time to reevaluate what you really want out of your life. Because you’re working hard and going no where… and that would burn anyone out! |
I have come to learn that love (that is, infatuation or lust) and stress are physiological twins. Let’s examine some of the similarities:
I qualify the term “love” here because I have learned, after more than 6 years of marriage and 29 years of other close relationships, that real love is entirely different from that kind of sweaty-palmed feeling you get when you see Johnny Depp dressed up like Captain Jack Sparrow. Or the initial stages of dating, when all you do is lie for 3-6 months so your prospective life mate won’t see who you really are and run screaming.
Love is hard. Love is dying to yourself. Love is submitting to each other. Love is not a doormat, but neither is it domineering. Love is the most wonderful and most painful thing we do. Read I Corinthians. It sums it up nicely.
“So tweh-zha your wuv….”
“Skip to the end!”
“Have you tha wing?”
Free ice cream for anyone who can name that movie 
There are many, many days that I wish I weren’t such a slave to my emotions. It’s hard to concentrate when my soul is so twisted up. On the way to work this morning, I started crying for no reason. Last night I was so irritable I could hardly stand myself. I’m unwilling to blame hormones because I think they get a bad rap.
Actually I do know what’s wrong. It’s this sense that I haven’t accomplished anything, and a hopelessness that I won’t ever accomplish anything noteworthy in my life.
Hopelessness seems to be a running theme in my life lately. I know it’s a lie but it’s damn hard to overcome. It’s like a gray shroud over my house. I can see through it but not clearly.
Wow, am I a walking commercial for the Duke depression study or what? “Do you overeat or have no appetite? Do you sleep too much or have insomnia? You may qualify to take sugar pills and live under a microscope for 6-8 weeks!”
And what is it about me that I like listening to hard rock when I’m mad at the world? It only feeds my attitude.
It’s a good thing the weather isn’t dependent on my mood. Although that would be cool, because then I’d be an X-file come true…you know the one where the weather man had this unconscious effect on the weather, and it was all because he had this huge unrequited love going for this chick who kept falling into bad relationships. At the end Mulder and Scully convinced both of them that they belonged together, and everyone lived happily ever after. Except Mulder and Scully, of course, because they thrive on suffering.
And now a haiku to lighten my mood:
Leaky light blue eyes
Don’t fret, there is hope for you–
Choc’late cures all ills.
I have a fat kitty. She is not agile. She is a tub o’ lub. And she runs like a raccoon. You know, with her butt all tucked up under her legs.
Yet for some reason, she has some kind of delusion that she is Super-Kitty! Destroyer of Bumblebees! She’s been crammed on my window ledge for the past hour stalking bees, and for the second time today, has taken it upon herself to leap, lunge, and otherwise heave her bulking mass out the window and into the azalea bush.
I should close the window but it’s just too dang funny. Especially because my role in this fiasco is to open the living room door and let her back in, since she can’t jump up high enough to get back in the window. She has me trained good.
Q: Why do blondes wear earmuffs?
A: To avoid the draft.
Q: Why did the blonde stare at the can of frozen orange juice for two hours?
A: Because the can said “concentrate” on it.
Q: How do you make a blonde laugh on Saturday?
A: Tell her a joke on Wednesday.
Q: What is the blonde doing when she holds her hands tightly over her ears?
A: Trying to hold on to a thought.
Q: Why don’t blondes have elevator jobs?
A: They don’t know the route.
Q: Why do blondes work seven days a week?
A: So you don’t have to retrain them on Monday.
Q: How does a blonde commit suicide?
A: She gathers her clothes into a pile and jumps off.
…And the list goes on.
Now, I am a blonde, and I take absolutely no offense at these jokes. Why? Because I have a very close brunette friend with absolutely ZERO common sense.
Nah, just kidding. I do have that friend, but I actually have never taken offense to blonde jokes because I have better things to do with my energy. They’re just jokes. If someone is going to judge me based on my hair color, that person has a severe problem with self-confidence.
In fact, I can make my own joke about it. True story: What kind of faith opens locked doors without a key? Blonde faith.
The other day I walked right into a building not knowing it was locked, opening the door with no problem, and the person behind me (who happened to be a brunette) couldn’t get in for anything.
Perhaps the modern-day interpretation of “faith like a child” really is “faith like a blonde.” That statement is problematic though, because our culture equates “blonde moments” with stupidity, which is quite different from child-like innocence and wonder. Talk to any kid for 2 minutes, and he will knock you off your feet with the amount of knowledge in his brain. We’ve got 8-year-olds writing reviews on complicated internet technology, for crying out loud.
A more accurate interpretation might be having “blonde faith” instead of “blind faith.” According to urbandictionary.com, blind faith is “unquestioning of anything that is dictated by the religion of choice, no matter how foolish, or even if one “rule” (or “guideline”) contradicts another.” This assumes of course that Christianity is more about a set of rules than a relationship with the one true living God.
There are at least two interesting points to the definition of blind faith though. First, I suppose faith in God does look blind because, well, the things of God are a mystery, and we do only see in part. But that’s not the whole story. We are admonished to test the spirits and doctrines against the Word of God. Jesus cautioned us to be wary and wise as serpents. So we are not really supposed to take everything on blind faith according to the scripture.
Second, many things about Christianity do look foolish to the world. In a literal example of “blind faith”, John tells a story of Jesus healing a blind man. According to the story, Jesus spat in the dirt, made a mud paste, and slathered it all over the blind man’s face without even asking him.
Jesus did this as a demonstration of God’s glory, and he must have known the blind man’s faith, because if I went out proclaiming the healing power of God and started throwing mud at blind people, I’d probably get punched. And I honestly don’t know if I would risk looking that foolish to the world if faced with such a command from God.
I guess the moral of this is, the wisdom of this world will get you nowhere in the kingdom of God. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 1:27 that God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise.
So take heart, blondes. Our time is coming.
Easter was hard for me this year. I got really caught up in some selfish thoughts and behavior, and at the same time built up a lot of resentment towards our culture that focuses entirely on the easter bunny and not at all on Christ. We were in Wal-Mart on Friday night and there was an ENTIRE AISLE crammed with people punching and pushing and fighting with each other over some stupid plastic easter eggs…meanwhile, 1 little bitty kiosk in the front had a few “positive-thinking” (not really Christian) easter-oriented items.
Yes, I know, we live in a secular society now. I mean, what did we get everyone for easter? Yep, easter bunny baskets with chocolate and other yummy non-Christ oriented crap. And my thoughts and behavior were exactly the opposite of what I should have been thinking and doing. I am hoo-man and so is everyone else. I should have relied on grace to get me through this weekend, but instead I just kind of blocked all that out.
Plus, our easter program, to me, was kind of anti-climatic. I hope that wasn’t really the case, and my bad attitude just clouded my view of the whole thing. Everyone did a great job, but I felt like I missed the mark, didn’t find the river, whatever analogy you want to stick in there.
Anyway, by the end of the weekend I learned two things from this experience:
So, here’s to a humbling and sobering beginning to my week.
I shoulda changed that stupid lock.
I shoulda made you leave your key.
Belly, you seem to be sneaking your way back into my life. A fry here, a cookie there…now I’m three or four pounds heavier than I was a month ago.
Maybe my boobs are conspiring against me. They liked their resting place and they got tired of supporting themselves.
Well, too bad boobs. Get a job. It’s time to evacuate the free space that existed a half inch in front of me just four weeks ago.
I’m not doing the right thing with my hands.
Instead of using them to express beauty, or as an expression of it, I ravage them.
It’s a compulsion, a habit, an outlet for stress relief or boredom, whatever. It’s grown steadily worse the older I get. I remember age 4 or 5, still sucking my thumb, and my dentist tried to use a reward/punishment system to get me to stop. I was supposed to put a frowny face on the calendar if I sucked my thumb that day, and a smiley if I didn’t. Mom didn’t like that system so we did something other than a frowny face…I think. I don’t remember too clearly, but I do remember not getting very many rewards.
I must have switched thumb sucking for nail biting. I tried nasty fingernail polish, gloves, regular fingernail polish–EVERYTHING on the market to try and stop biting my nails. My uncle even tried to pay me to quit biting them.
Eventually I moved on to the skin around the nail. Gross. I won’t go into any more detail.
God is about to change all that. Another layer of the onion is about to get peeled off. Ouch.
I can’t wait
I suspect it’s got something to do with my music. Probably the piano. What a thorn in my side. What a beautiful instrument. What I wouldn’t give to be as free in the piano as I am with my voice, or the drum.
Part of it is unskillfulness. Skill comes with practice. I can already transpose like a fiend. I’ve got the scales down pat. Piano theory is no problem. But as much as I love it, I just can’t get comfortable playing it. Too much emotional garbage.
If the two are really connected, it’ll be awesome to see what God does. But whatever the reason for this compulsive habit, I’m really sick of doing it and I can’t wait to get free. Come Lord Jesus.