From the Mind of Meegs

As part of my never-ceasing attempts to avoid being a complete heathen, I have tried to be mindful this advent season about Christmas and all the crap that it means, other than peppermint white chocolate mochas at Starbucks and trips to the mall to shop for "gifts" by which I mean "more things for me, and for other people if I happen upon something for them."

I love the whole idea of advent, but it has occured to me lately that the three concepts perhaps most associated with advent--peace, joy, and hopeful/expectant waiting--are also probably the things I suck hardest at. Worry, anger and impatience are often the order of the day for me. This can be in small matters (my oft-discussed road rage) or in larger, meaning-of-life sort of matters.

Sometimes, I wonder why Christianity holds any appeal, to anyone least of all me, when it is pretty much all about how much you suck. I mean, God is perfect, right? So if things aren't going well, clearly it's you who suck, not him. Distressed and worried about where your life is going? Then either (a) you've messed it up and you need to stop messing it up, or (b) you haven't sinned, per se, but you're not relying on God's perfect peace and his perfect timing. In other words, you suck.

I'm being flippant, obviously. But there's a nugget of truth here. If you go trolling the Bible for answers or at least insight into any of the major problems that beset us as humans, the answer always contains, in some form or another, tidings of your own suckage. Not exactly tidings of comfort and joy, mind you.

Sometimes I think my obsession with my own suckage is just an excuse. It's an excuse to devolve into a  "woe is me, I'll never be good enough" pity party instead of sacking up and working to at least improve myself on some of these issues. In other words, I'm still sucking hard. I suck in the way that I approach my own suckage, if that makes any sense. Nothing but suck piled upon suck piled upon suck.

I realize none of this is new. I'm not Catholic, but it turns out there's plenty of Evangelical Guilt to go around as well. The whole question of what to do with a religion that is predicated on how much you suck hangs over Christianity. And I imagine it's not going away anytime soon. The longevity of this issue means that we've had plenty of time to come up with ways of approaching it, and of those ways I'm acquainted with, some are fairly good. But the longevity of this issue also means that, of those many ways, none has proven entirely satisfactory or else the issue would go away entirely, wouldn't it?

Of course, there is a perfect answer. We as humans just can't fully appreciate or comprehend that answer. Why? Well, because we suck at developing understanding and perspective, for starters...