well, she's drunk again. my mom, that is. not like staggeringly drunk, but intoxicated enough to be pretty cloudy in judgement. and she in my stepdad are in some sort of fight that I arrived in the middle of. this is rare... they do not fight often, from what i know. i think it has something to do with his kids, but apparently i am not an accomplished eavesdropper because I cannot make out much of the conversation going on upstairs. it just bothers me that my mom has been at least a little buzzed practically the whole time I have been here in Des Moines. i hate that because it means we can't have real conversations and i just feel like she doesn't value my time. i spend 6 hours each way driving back and forth and we don't get to spend any time together. it's sad.
anyway, on to other stuff. one thing that I addressed yesterday before my blog got erased was kim's excerpt "anonymous prayer for grace." i agreed with everything but the initial "deliver me from the desire of being..." statements. those made me a bit uncomfortable. that something is a desire often implies that it is innate. Asking to be delivered from the desire of being loved, honored, praised, etc., is really saying that those desires are carnal and "bad." it is there that I disagree. CS Lewis wrote that nothing can be bad for bad's sake, that everything that we deem "bad" is really something good in lack or excess. all the desires expressed in the prayer for grace really come down to the basic desire to be valued, which i believe is something that God had in mind when he created us in His own image. if we were supposed to be without the desire to be valued, then we would have no reason as christians to love others and to put so much emphasis on meeting the world's needs. those desires are only wrong when they are comparitive (i.e., the desire to be loved more than someone else) or in excess. when we start asking God to remove those desires from us, I think we start getting a little too Buddhistic. Personal worth is important. God knows this and that is why He encourages us to encourage one another. anyway, i'll step off of my soapbox now. ;)
to helen. saying goodbye to tomato paste (or any other edible product, for that matter), is a tough decision to make. what exactly does it mean to you? does it mean thinking of no hope for the future? does it mean eliminating the possibility of a friendship? in any case, a skill that is worth mastering is that of taking captive of every thought. this is a tedious process, but the more it is practiced, the easier it gets. every time you have a thought of tomato paste, you replace it with a thought of something godly. or, as i sometimes do with Juice Tin, every time you have a thought of tomato paste you remind yourself that he is "just a boy who thinks he's a man" and that you want a MAN and not just a boy who thinks he is one. the former is always the better choice, but both options help keep your thoughts from drifting to where they should not go when you. really your mission is somewhat complete once you have convinced yourself or been convinced that you just don't want tomato paste anymore. learning how to move past that stage to the point of effective personal reconciliation is something that i can't offer suggestions on, as i don't think i've mastered it or really done it well. it just takes a long time of growth and maturation, i think. anyway, these are my thoughts for the night. I need to go to bed now though, as i have to get up in 7 hours to drive back to chicago. i love you both ladies...
