Well, before I write anything else, I have to tell an anecdote that I, yes I, am the center of. I was at my friends' house and my roommate Megan and I were about to leave. I went to put on my shoes, but they were nowhere to be found. I started getting a little worried that I was crazy...I mean, where the stink were my brown fake-birkenstock slip on shoes (they have a name, but I'm blanking on that at the moment). At any rate, I couldn't find them. So we all started looking, thinking someone may have taken them as a practical joke (it was a guy's house, what would you think had happened?). Until I looked down and saw my running shoes sitting there. Apparently I had worn my running shoes and not the other ones. Yeah. I'm blond, and now it's obvious to EVERYONE. :)On a more serious note, I'm glad for the holiday season. I was a participant (with a listening role) in a conversation with my manager at work today. And he said he really didn't like the holidays, because there was nothing about them except stress (I work retail) and spending money, and YEAH, baby Jesus was born, if you actually believe in that. It made me sad. Because for a lot of the world, it's true. The Christmas season is about what you can get. People don't know the Truth anymore, they don't know the Gospel in its fullness, they think Christianity is about being a good person (or a close-minded, right extremist) and then you'll get to heaven and everyone who doesn't have the same moral code goes to hell. Well, NO, that's not what Christ's life actually meant to the world. Again, it's about admitting that you can't earn your salvation, knowing how much of a sinner you are, and accepting the free gift of salvation that God offers to every single person who ever was, is, or will be (not just upper middle-class white Americans). Millions of people in the world outside of the United States get it way more than we do. Because they have to fight every day to stay alive simply for believing. The American church, for the most part, has been lulled into a passionless existence because we have all the material stuff we could ever want. I don't want to be that kind of Christian. I want my loyalties to lie first and foremost with Jesus Christ, not the church. His authority is above the church's authority. People don't understand the infinite value of Christ or the infinite rebellion of sin. There's a reason why Satan is called the father of lies. He doesn't get you to come to his side by saying, "hey, I'm against God and I want to destroy people's lives with evil, come on over!" No, he entices us (to use a probably overused metaphor) with a beautiful banquet of food, and it's not until we've sat down and had our fill of it that we realize it was poisoned. I made a mistake today too...boy does my impatience get in the way. I need to trust God more.