I am the most selfish person I know.

In other unrelated news, I've been kind of down lately. It's really been around the last two months or so. I thought I snapped out of it last week but I'm right back in. Kind of a "gee ain't it awful" and "poor me" attitude. I don't like it, but I also don't know how to get out of it.

Sat in on a gathering of believers on Sunday night. AMAZING! Some great people asking some great questions and some great teaching. Two things that struck me:

1) Q: Is it all right to ask God the tough questions?
A: I believe the answer to this question is yes. The thing is, we need to be all right with the answer we will get. I think of Habbakuk asks how God can look at all of the wrongdoing in the world and do nothing. But God answers that He is doing something, He is going to raise up the Babylonians who will sweep through the land and destroy it. What? God, how can you do that? God says, "But the Lord is in His holy temple, let all the earth be silent before Him." WOW! Job, along with his friends, kind of shook his fist at God and asked some tough questions, and God's answer here is timeless:

Where were you when I laid the earth's foundations?
Have you ever given orders to the morning or shown the dawn its place?
Have you seen the gates of the shadow of death?
Have you entered the storehouses of the snow or seen the storehouses of the hail?

I could go on and on, instead, read Job 38-39 again and marvel at the wonders of our Lord!

2) This is a group of people who are not big fans of the organized church, and one guy went off pretty well. And he was right in what he was saying. I agreed with him totally. He was bitter and was sticking up his middle finger at the organized religion. Yet if Philip Yancey has taught me anything, it's that we have to be careful that we don't get mad at Jesus when we blast the organized Church. That's not His plan. People have ruined it. It is the sin of man that has destroyed the look of the Church. And there are still good organized churches out there, they are just rare. We can blast the humaness of the Church, but don't blame God for the state it is in. That's a tough road to hoe, yet an important one. Get mad at the organization, but not the Creator.

By the way, that posting a few weeks ago about the hypocrisy of Easter and Christmas and how I can't stand it and play along, it's creeping into other areas of my life. Kind of scary.