Last Exit Before Oblivion

What if we all responded instantly with kindness instead of judgment? I, at least, am well trained in this regard. If something breaks, goes wrong, has a problem, judgment is the first thing I do.

If God weren't kind, His Son could have stayed home. Yet the first assumption in people's minds when they hear the word "God" is "judgment." Guilt comes along for the ride.

There are wolves out there who will tear at the kindness of people. Kindness leaves the doors open. God sees the world in different terms. No matter what the wolves do to His Name or His Son, He remains Himself. He heaps kindness on the wayward. The wolves have chosen, and God has also chosen. We all live by our choices.

It's a more subtle matter than I at first thought. God's quiet kindness reaches deep, affecting everything in me. Sometimes I get it, but sometimes I ignore Him.

He's not upset with me for ignoring Him. He's more hurt than anything else; one analogy is cutting the umbilical cord to the fetus. I've become so good at living without God that the feeling of living with Him is very strange and very threatening. All the things I have feared for all of my life are coming to pass, and I don't know how to live with them.

Is this kindness? Taking over a life and rearranging it? Moving me into a very strange place where emotions become real instead of some distant hint of a theory? God has explained, over and over, the reasons for doing so. There is no real life with God unless one is a whole human being, and I'm far from whole. I'm a sort of kernel of something or other, around which is wrapped parental instruction, and over that is the layer of my own manipulations. I assume the kernel is there. What is it? What kind of person am I, really?

There are people's opinions all over the place. They don't count for much because I won't let them. My own opinion is uniformly bad, which is why I work so hard at distraction. God's opinion threatens the whole flimsy, shaky, jury-rigged structure, but calls to me with the hints of truth that I've always sought.

I like truth. Truth doesn't stab you in the back. It changes through time, and there are surprises, but the underlying truth is solid gold, never rusting. You can build with it. The process of finding truth becomes interesting when the path diverges from that of everyone else, but given the choice between lots of acquaintances and truth I've always chosen truth. Perhaps to avoid the complications of emotions as for any other reason.

Now all of this is changing. I don't see the world as I used to, and the only reason I can endure any of this crap is that God's kindness is unchanging. That's one truth I will hold onto, as it's all I have to make life worth going on with day by day.