Eats, Shoots, and Blogs

The book "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" prompted me to acknowledge that I am, in fact, a grammatical stickler. I am also an occassional blogger. This, to me, is a great paradox. It would seem that being an author of sorts and being a grammatical stickler would go together like hot cocoa and marshmallows. Not so, I have found. Why? Because I make mistakes. Stupid ones, ones I should know better than to make. And it seems I often miss them until I am myself surfing the web, which of course eventually leads to my blog, and of course when I arrive there I am compelled to read it to make sure nothing terribly new and interesting has occurred in the world since my last visit. (Note to self: self's blog hasn't announced any "terribly new and interesting" world occurrences in quite a while.) Nevertheless, I can never know for sure that my blog's as I last left it without reading it, so I make the visit and, voila, find that the byte bugs (or is it "bug bytes?") have apparently disrupted my perfect construction and demand immediate repair. It really is a disheartening thing for me to realize I'm not perfect.

On the other hand, if I were perfect, I'd have to be perfect all the time, and that's an even more discouraging thought. So, I thank God I'm imperfect and that He loves me anyway - even if my letters don't always line up right!

You know, it's like life. None of us has it all together. Our letters don't always line up like they're "supposed" to or like we want them to. Our commas and periods sometimes get lost when we really needed the break, or placed in the most inconvenient places. Sometimes the book ends just when we wanted it to go on forever, or we find a chapter needing to be put it out of its misery. Those are chapters and books of our lives. Imperfect as they are, though, they're ours, given to us and to no one else. No one has lived or ever will live our unique stories. And those stories, regardless of the mistakes we've made, the errant commas we've inserted, or the coloring outside the lines we've done, can be beautiful. It's through our failures and mistakes that Love can be revealed - the purest of all colors infusing the bleakest drawing and turning it into a radiant story. Jesus' love not only covers all sin, it colors every story - if we'll but let it.

I know it sounds pretty bizarre - most of us want to be perfect all the time - most of us want to be good enough to warrant justified love - but I think we should all take a moment to thank God that we're sinners - because without failure, we could never fully experience the overwhelming deepness of the love of Jesus.