dual personalities

Well, I got my new license plates at the DMV yesterday. Bingpot! It wasn’t a terrible experience. Somehow I feel that everyone is feeling lighter and less burdened by care these days. Waiting/standing in a long line is not the end of the world.

In my morning Bible reading I am in 2 Corinthians and I was struck by this:

For our boast is this, the testimony of our conscience, that we behaved in the world with simplicity and godly sincerity, not by earthly wisdom but by the grace of God, and supremely so toward you. (2 Cor. 1:12)

What a gem! Make that my epitaph, please. I’m afraid I have a long way to go, however, in becoming more serious, less frivolous. My fellow church members are a very serious tribe. They do not joke around. I am learning.

I know what I have to do–in the words of Charles Spurgeon: “We must conquer—some of us especially—our tendency to levity. A great distinction exists between holy cheerfulness, which is a virtue, and that general levity, which is a vice. There is a levity which has not enough heart to laugh, but trifles with everything; it is flippant, hollow, unreal. A hearty laugh is no more levity than a hearty cry.”

So let us try to be more cheerful and less relentlessly superficial (as John Piper would say). One day at a time.