Nick is arriving in a week & a half – geez time flies. I keep getting these butterflies in my stomach when I think about it… it’s like I want to impress him with my good looks and my witty banter, hoping to win him over (even though he’s already mine). I think separation does that to people, at least it does it to me.

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I was just looking at a website with conspiracy theories – I buy into very little of it though. In some respect there is comfort in believing in the Illuminati and other evil organizations because then it explains why there is this unequal distribution and places the blame on the secret elite instead of on all of us.

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It sucks realizing you’re a part of the problem with the world. The status quo benefits me and that makes it difficult to want to change it. Probably the simplest example is that I’m overweight while others literally starve to death. I struggle with controlling my portions because I like eating that much and there is an endless supply of food available to me. It’s embarrassing but I have surprisingly little guilt about it all.

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Yano, I hate it how so many people write off war, poverty and hunger as just a part of the human condition. Actually at this point I feel like cussing; I won’t, but not because I don’t think it wouldn’t be justified.

• Imagine you didn’t have enough food and had to pick which child to let starve to death first.
• Imagine you lived in a conflict zone and your young daughters were repeatedly raped and sodomized by soldiers.

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I’d like to think if we were in any other situation except the one we happen to be in (which is a pretty freakin cozy one) that we’d be praying to God that someone would help us – that they wouldn’t get caught up in politicizing everything or using religious justifications to ignore us, but that they’d just see us as neighbors, as people.

The more I learn the less I like many of the most popular “isms” – nationalism, capitalism, patriotism. It seems easy to become blinded by them.

We start believing we ought to get a bigger piece of the pie – in fact, we deserve it, our nation deserves it – it’s all just a blessing from God. That has got to be the biggest crock of poo poo I’ve ever heard.

I hate it when people say things about God being on “our side” – last time I checked, God was on the side of people, all people. I didn’t know God played favorites and that all you had to do was check who was at the top of the stock market or who had the biggest cache of weapons to know whose God’s favorite of the month was.

Jesus preached the kingdom of God here and now; by using the language of “kingdom” Jesus directly undermined the Roman empire, the kingdom of the first century. I love that Jesus took slogans meant for the emperor and used them for himself.  Sometimes I wonder if Jesus’s message is too radical for us so we have to Christianize it and make it easier to swallow.

I believe that the kingdom of God isn’t something we just wait to experience when we die, it’s something we’re supposed to be creating here. We’ve been given this amazing opportunity to live for 70+ years and I don’t get why some seem to sit on their hands just thanking Jesus that they’re one day closer to escaping this world. This world is a gift and we make it what it is – it can be heaven or it can be hell. I can’t imagine not wanting to make it as peaceful and godly as possible. We have the same capacity for good as we do for evil, so ultimately we can’t blame God or Satan or anyone but ourselves.

…hehehe =) I was feeling a little mischievous this afternoon…