Love Wins

The blog writing has been weak lately. I apologize. It's been the end of the school year for my wife, which means our family focus becomes getting to that final day. I haven't cracked open the computer in a week. I check Facebook and email on occasion in case of emergency, but it's been a good break. We've had family in and the separation has done me good. I kind of like not being tied to a screen so much.

Now that summer has arrived, I'm looking at a wall of work. Good work, but work nonetheless. The wall is made up of four sermons, two essays, and prep for two classes I'll be teaching this fall. I've set a tentative and unrealistic deadline of July 1st for getting it all done. That's not likely to happen, but I will be working, hopefully about four hours a day for the rest of the month.

I spent the day today getting some final errands done before diving into the work. The afternoon was family time, although not as much as my wife would like (I spent a lot of it catching up on computery internet things).

My daughter's development is flying these days. She's climbing stairs and while she's not talking, she's pretty good at communicating what she wants. It seems like every hour there's something new. Everyone said it would happen, but I realized today how much I miss her as a baby. She's not a baby anymore. When she was, I just wanted her to be able to communicate. I wanted to give her what she needed, but it was tough to know what that was.

Now, it's pretty easy to know what she needs, but she's much more concerned with what she wants. That's less fun.

This whole developing a personality thing is not as nice as it's cracked up to be. She's becoming her own person. What's worse, the person she's becoming is an awful lot like me. Scary. I'm already encountering so much that I wish were different.

Check that.

I'm encountering so much in her personality that would be easier for me if it was different. That's life, though, right? It only gets worse from here. At some point soon, she'll be a crazed zombie, living in my house and angry about everything. Sooner than I think, I think.

Good thing for me I watched a zombie movie tonight. Warm Bodies wasn't a great movie. It's a love story about zombies. It's not even a great zombie movie.

The message, though, as overt and silly as it is, is simply that love can change the world. The zombies are re-animated, brought back to life; the world is redeemed and restored - through love.

It's cheesy and silly. But so is the gospel. That's really all it is. Love. Love everyone. Love your angry, crying infant daughter. Love her when she acts the same way at fifteen. Love your enemies. Love those who want to kill you and eat your brains. Love them. You never know what might happen. It's foolish and unrealistic and perhaps that's why I like this gospel so much.


(Someone remind me of this post in about 13 years.)