I wanna love You better whatever it takes . . .

no, this is NOT the most recent title of an e-mail from my spam folder. Rather, it is a description of myself thatI am none too proud of.

 The scenario: In the supermarket today, and had to go see how the Mega Millions was doing. Stupid, stupid lottery for stupid, stupid people such as myself. (A friend of mine, after hearing me admit that I actually play the lottery, replied with, “Oh, so you pay ’stupid tax’?” OUCH. the truth hurts.) Well, unfortunately nobody won last night, so it’s up to the ridiculous amount of $150 million . . .

I think I have said here before that God does NOT want me to play the lottery. So basically, I’m blatantly sinning, a dollar at a time every time I choose to buy a ticket. (It’s just a good thing that I’m not still Catholic!)

So there I am in the queue to purchase my tickets (there wouldn’t be a line like this if I was in Cascade . . . since the lottery is as much a “poor person tax” as it is a “stupid tax” . . . ) and I have two dollars in my hand . . . and I start to have this inner dialogue with myself . . . because I usually never allow myself to buy more than one ticket for a drawing, with the reasoning that, “If God really wanted me to win” (WHICH HE DOES NOT!) “He would obviously not need more than one ticket to make this happen.” But for some reason today, I had two dollars in my hand, and as I waited for my turn to buy my ticket throw away my money, I was having an internal argument with myself . . . “well, you really shouldn’t tempt God like that . . . remember that sermon you heard a long time ago, about how God told Moses to speak to the rock so that it would bring forth water, and he disobeyed by not only using his staff instead of following God’s orders, but more so by striking it twice?”

and then it hit me. I was mis-applying what was no doubt the convicting voice of the Holy Spirit and twisting that conviction in such a way that it satisfied my own sinful desire to do exactly what I wanted to do anyway. Not to mention that God’s no dummy, as I seem to keep forgetting . . .  

It’s not that I want to be rich, or so I say . . . it’s that I dream of all that I could do with the money . . . on the “short list”, a seven-days-a-week anti-racism education center in Grand Rapids, and getting myself and a few dozen of my dearest friends “back to zero”, as in, out of debt . . . the rest to be given away . . . “So you see, Lord, I have such WONDERFUL PLANS for this money, for using it for Your Kingdom!”

yes, I really do spend (waste!) hours upon hours tending to and feeding this idol of mine . . .

but what I really want, more than anything else, is to be free. Even if my tangible,  earth-bound reality is such that I will never break free of the financial chains that choke me, I want more than anything to be TRULY free . . . like the title of my blog, I want to love HIM better . . . I WANT to want God more than I want anything else, even the so-called “security” of being free of debt in a human sense.

the road to freedom, however, does not begin at the lottery counter at the 28th Street Meijer. It begins in a Book that gets far too little attention from me, and with a Person who, despite my tainted human perception of Him, is far more likely to be saddened by the choices I make than exasperated or even angry about them.

no frickin’ way. I just wrote an extensive, impassioned, painstakingly-edited post on this topic, and it seems to have disappeared. I was saving the drafts all along, but I must’ve hit some other key at the last minute and deleted the whole thing.

I have no doubt in my mind that this was the enemy’s work . . . I’m not at all being facetious. But I’ll write it again . . . of course, it likely won’t be as good as the original, but no matter how many times I try to hit the “back” arrow or the “undo” key, it’s just not there.

(pale imitation of the original post’s greatness follows after the fold . . . )  

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I saw this documentary yesterday–Thank GOD for the $3.50 theater, which besides being affordable (as long as you don’t want to eat anything!), is also bringing a number of documentaries into this sorry old town.

The movie was only in Grand Rapids for a few days, but I’m guessing that it will be out on video fairly soon, if it isn’t already–so add it to your NetFlix list NOW. And read more about how you can take action against this modern-day slavery (at different points in the movie, it is referred to as “almost” slavery or “quasi-slavery”–BULLSHIT! There’s nothing “quasi” about it!)  that is taking place right in our own hemisphere, and with generous subsidies from the US Government.

 One of my friends expressed concern that this documentary would hold up the “white man” as the hero, and to some extent that is the case, but more than that, it seems to me that (at least in one pivotal scene near the end of the movie), it’s the CHURCH–God’s people standing together–that comes across as the TRUE hero.

But when you see it, you can let me know what you think . . .

So it wasn’t bad enough that my car broke down on Sunday, or that I found out on Monday that the repairs will cost something like $1500 (which I don’t have now, and am not likely to have anytime soon . . . or perhaps EVER.)

And it’s not enough that my call to my doctor’s office this afternoon to see if they’d received my CT scan results yet yielded a “no, we don’t have them yet”, despite the fact that the brand spankin’ new hospital where it was done claims on its website that its “new, state-of-the-art technology” enables them to share test results with lightning speed.

(or that I threw up from the contrast dye they had to inject–yes, that was ALSO on Sunday.)

But today, on top of all of this, THEY REPO’D MY TRASH CAN!

I’m out of checks (I stopped tithing in June, the first time my car broke down, and I hardly use checks otherwise) and this is one of those bills that just seems to fall by the wayside–it’s not easy to pay it online–so I just never got around to it. Not that I have the money at this point, anyway . . .

In her book Traveling Mercies, Anne Lamott talks about how a lot of things going wrong at once is viewed by some as evidence that “something big and lovely is trying to get itself born“. But she doesn’t totally buy that, and neither do I. I think that part of the problem, though, is that I do foolish things like titling my blog, “I wanna love You better whatever it takes“, not realizing that God might take me up on my offer.

Right now I just need to crawl into bed and spend some time feeling sorry for myself.

I am a child of the eighties, and as such, was exposed to a fair amount of Depeche Mode. This song had particular significance to me (or at any rate, my friends enjoyed pointing out the parallels between the song and my own life), and to be honest, there have been more than a few times in my life where I have wondered if God really didn’t have ”a sick sense of humor” after all . . .

But today, I know the truth. I know that the God I serve is sovereign, loving, and good, and that no matter what happens, I am going to stand until the end of my days with Job and others like him who have chosen to call His name blessed when He gives AND when He takes away.