In the Woods

I have to eat more. I think I'm losing weight again. Indeed, I have been eating less. Not at all today, until deep into evening. Then I attempted a workout and, well, it was not pretty.

Failure is discouraging. It's tangled up with self-worth. I failed because I'm bad stupid useless and therefore I am unloved hated. Well that's how the world is. News about a little five-year-old girl sold by her mother some number of times for sex, now found murdered and dumped in the woods. Where was God?

Some years ago catastrophe overtook me and I lost assets and standing and family and hope and actually several other things that I won't be even this non-specific about. I haven't been back to church since. God does not protect the innocent. He does not protect children, or families, or honesty or righteousness or innocence.

What is the future? Something that Jesus said to not concern ourselves with. Not urging us to irresponsibility. It's just that towers fall and crush passersby, and armed men come and make victims out of citizens. It's why people believe in fate. I don't believe in fate any more than I believe in the assurance of earthly blessings. God keeps his promises. He just never promised to keep us safe. He deals with eternity -- a longer span than the future Jesus had in mind.

God is forgiving, but reality is not. Physics is unrelenting, and acknowledges no repentance. What this tells me is that physics may not be more powerful, but it is far more present than God. When that little girl was being sodomized, as she must have been, and stabbed or strangled in close proximity to spilled jizzum, that was science at work, biology and psychology. No actual theology involved -- just pathology. When I failed in my workout 4 minutes in, well, don't I know that people have to eat?

See how it is? We are victims of choices, our own or of monstrous mothers and murderous scum. Victims of happenstance as well, having turned right instead of left, or waited a moment instead of moving. What horrors have we missed, for such choices? Or suffered?

I see people speaking of the future as if it were a real thing. We have to act as if it were. That's what hope is. But always in my heart I hear the sound of stifled sobs, memory of lost loved ones and the triumph of evil. Compassion is easy. Some people bleed it. Even so, as I referenced in my last entry, in the things that matter we must persevere.

The cat came back. Murdered little molested girls don't come back. Somehow, though, God will find comfort for them, and redress, the wounds to their souls healed, and the price in suffering they have paid will buy them, somehow, comforts of infinitely greater value. I forget this most of the time, psychology being what it is.

Self-esteem? The things that I'm good at, I'm better than great. It's not how pretty I am. I'm not pretty. It's not how smart I am -- there are plenty of plenty smart people. But this blog is an example. Anyone who knows it and doesn't value it is an absolute fool. That's my self-esteem. I can fail in my workouts. I can be stupid or irresponsible, sometimes, once in a while, where other people aren't depending on me. I don't have to eat. My self-esteem can absorb occasional failure, and learn from it. It makes me wiser, and eventually stronger.

That's how God sees his fallen creation. It can be full of failure, and yet, somehow, of infinite value. Enough, somehow, to be worth an infinity of suffering.


J