Fear (and Loathing)

There are certainly hundreds of other blogs out there which address fear in our world today. Our impeteus for so many actions is fear--fear of the future, of the other, of rejection.

Why do we let fear determine our lives?

Bee? Mine!

The last few weeks, I've been thinking a lot about bees.

There are many things they stand for:

self-sacrifice

communal living

female power

the resurrection

eternal life

fertility.

There's the land of milk and honey. John the Baptist ate locusts and wild honey.

Legend says that, at Christ's crucifixion, the bees swarmed.

My grandfather was a bee keeper.

Bees hum.

And bees, they dance.

I'll make the bee mine.

The Ultimate Zing!

Ok, so an obscure show on Cartoon Network may not be what I want to use to make this point. But the fact that "The Ultimate Zing!" is said with a sing-song tone and all about getting the last word in like a jab.... it illustrates the point quite well.

In the past week, I've been on both sides of that Zing, and I can tell you one thing--it doesn't feel good on either side of the Zing. Tonight I had the unfortunate knee-jerk reaction of simply laughing at something a colleague said, when said colleague was trying to be helpful.

It wasn't a pretty laugh, either, but one of those belly-rolling "how stupid" laughs. And the worst part is, I was nasty in front of others.

Worthy of work: always putting myself in the other person's shoes, in fact, making it an automatic practice. And not only because you feel like a huge douche when you realize you've done it, or even having to apologize in front of others because you realize how utterly embarrassing it could be for others.

But because it lacks the Grace God calls us to. Consider the Psalmist's praises: "The LORD is gracious and compassionate,

slow to anger and rich in love."

Are we, as his people, showing this in our daily interactions with one another?

As easy as Grace may seem--simply asking for forgiveness, or an empathy which allows you to avoid even needing to ask for forgiveness--it is not cheap, not true Grace. It requires us to make ourselves low, and wait for Christ to raise us up. We must think nothing of ourselves and respect the person across from us; we act out of love, not out of "right" and "wrong", which God does not consider when he deals with us.