dual personalities

It’s been a strange year, indeed. And stranger things are no doubt in store. However, today I choose to focus on the positive. At least two great things have happened this year.

The first is a no brainer: little Katie was born in the middle of the pandemic and she is truly a pearl beyond price.

However, another great thing happened a few weeks ago, which I haven’t mentioned, but it has made me smile every time I think about it.

Our neighbors across the street sold their giant RV! Yes, we no longer have to see it every time we look out our living room window and our cul de sac no longer looks like a trailer park.

Their driveway still looks like a used car lot and the unused trampoline in the side yard still gathers leaves more efficiently than their teenage son can keep up with the leaves in their yard, but, hey, I’m not quibbling.

No doubt, something equally heinous will take its place, but such is community life. I mean these are the same people who halted their home renovation halfway through and it stayed half done for over a year with numerous ladders leaning up against the house. They frequently have an industrial dumpster in their driveway for extended periods of time. But this was big. A major source of triggering for me has been removed and so I am grateful.

Of course, they haven’t put up their Christmas decorations yet…

(Check out more festively decorated homes around my flyover hometown here.)

Well, I wouldn’t want you to think I haven’t repented many times for criticizing my neighbors and hated my terrible sinful nature, so here’s a great prayer from an early English Puritan, David Clarkson:

Lord, I would be the most miserable person in the world if my hopes were only in this life. Why? Because I am hopeless without Christ’s righteousness. My life could never be comfortable, and there would be no hope at all of eternal life.

If you denied me that hope, I would be the most miserable one of all. I may be happy without worldly enjoyments, but all things in the world cannot make me happy without this.

So however you treat me in this world, whatever you deny me, Lord, deny me not this. I can be happy without riches and abundance, like Job and Lazarus were. I can be happy even if I am reviled and reproached, as was Christ and his disciples. I can be happy and comfortable in prison, as were Paul and Silas.

But I cannot be happy without the righteousness of Christ.

All the riches, places, or honors on earth will leave me miserable if I am without this. Even if I were rich and needed nothing, without this I would still be wretched and miserable, poor, blind, and naked.

If I had all things that a person could desire on earth, what good would it do me without Christ’s righteousness?

What would riches do for me, if they came with the wrath of God? What comfort would honor bring me, if I remained a son of perdition or a child of wrath?

What sweetness would there be in pleasure, if I were on the path to everlasting torments?

What miserable comforts and enjoyments are these, without Christ’s righteousness!

Lord, however you deal with me in outward things, whatever you take from me, whatever you deny me—do not deny me Christ! Do not deny me a share in his righteousness! Amen.

–David Clarkson (1622-1686)

Need a great Christmas present? Here you go.

P.S. In an effort to broaden my movie viewing and try some newer Christmas movies, I have watched/half watched some really bad movies. Case in point: Jingle All the Way (1996) starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sinbad. Excruciating. And they made a sequel. It’s back to the classics for me.

Have a good week!

*Luke 5: 26