A button fell off of a pile of books on my desk and landed underneath my lamp, sending a ray of searing light into my eyes. Moments later, my eyes had adjusted, and I could see again just fine, but the experience started a train of thought that I'd like to share. It has to do with acceptance. As the story goes, Saul was dead set on finding, persecuting, and killing every follower of Jesus's he could find. That is, until one day God shone a dazzling light onto Saul, blinding him, and instructed him on how he should live his life from then on out. Saul went along with this readily, presumably because he had just received explicit and direct career counseling from the Almighty, in a rather dramatic way. The rest of us tend not to have it so easily. While God does help guide us along our live's paths, our missives from on high tend not to be as clear-cut or have quite the same flair as Saul's. At the times when I can tell that I'm supposed to have my digital ham radio set to "receive" and not "transmit," the messages are either cryptic to the point of being barely decipherable or retrospective. It's hard to be open to God's will in our lives when it's not specifically clear what God's will IS. If it were clear across the board, then there wouldn't be fragmentation or schisms or any sort of division among the fellowship of Christ, because we wouldn't have anything to argue about (on a theological plane, anyway). Instead, we are left with our own interpretations, and must do out best to reconcile our interpretations with one another's, because that is a part of God's will that IS clear and specific: that we should love our neighbor as ourselves. As a phrase, it sounds very simple. But egotistical creatures that we are, it is one of the hardest tasks that we can endeavor to undertake. I'm going to take a step off to one side for a minute to make this analogy. God is like a sports coach. The good, encouraging kind, not the kind that berates you if you don't make a goal/basket/base hit/whatever sport you follow. God is the coach who, even after you miss that crucial kick, cheers for you and congratulates you and takes you out for pizza for giving it your all. We can earn that coach's respect, in a very simple but challenging way: playing nice and doing our best with what we have.

See you out on the field.

Tunes: "God Only Knows," The Beach Boys (iTMS); "Superman," Five For Fighting (iTMS); "I Want To Be A Christian," The Proclaimers (Real Audio stream).