Oh, life is fun sometimes. By "fun" I mean frustrating, angering, tiring, depressing, and difficult. Not sleeping much adds to the delights of everything else that's going on.
I find people to be the most maddening things in the world. Maddening because they are what life is about, but sometimes I wish I could live without most of them. I find the majority of humans to be utterly confusing and selfish. Certainly I am not a very nice creature myself generally. But I must say that the people who I dislike the most easily are those who are inconsistent. Really.
For example, a person, call him Joe, says he loves someone, say Mary. Joe takes care of Mary, paying her bills, making sure she has food to eat. Yet Joe rarely treats Mary with the common respect with which you would expect him to treat strangers. He belittles her, picks on her (under the guise of humor), and sometimes even tells her to her face she isn't worth anything. Oh, but Joe LOVES Mary.
Worse, Joe claims to be a Christian. No one can really say he ISN'T a Christian. Indeed, he attends church regularly, is an upstanding citizen, and is generally a "nice" person. Truly, it isn't fair to accuse Joe of not being a Christian. Yet, the way he treats Mary is NOT Christlike. He treats her like a lesser being. He doesn't celebrate her talents (unless they are talents he is interested in himself), and makes little effort to support her acivities. But Joe is a Christian and he LOVES Mary.
Inconsistency. I despise it, although surely I, too, am guilty of it.
Add inconsistent humanity to being a wife, being a mother, and recovering from labor and delivery. Today, I need to wash diapers (cloth ones, naturally), not too difficult a task. But I would much rather sit around eating Reeses and watching TV. I don't much feel like cooking, but someone should, so we don't starve. And I am wearing these jeans, doggonit, even though when I sit down they somehow begin to cut off circulation in my belly. Who knew they could even DO that?
All complaining aside, I love my baby. I love my husband. Maybe God allows irritating people in our lives to teach us what NOT to be. If I love my husband and daughter, and claim to be a Christian, I must treat them the way I would be treated myself. Not only MUST I do this, but I WANT to do this.
So, as I unzip my jeans and exhale for the first time in twenty minutes, I resolve to make a GIGANTIC effort to treat others with kindness, whether they are good, bad, or ugly OR inconsistent!!!! Because I am no less flawed than any of them, just differently flawed.
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