Happy new year!

Sunday – Breakfast at home, travel to hospital to spend time with my father in law who is recovering from a fall. Lunch in the hospital cafeteria. Started “People Buy You” by Jeb Blount.

Watched and shared a YouTube interview with Keith Green. On the topic of young people thinking they can ride into Christianity on their parent’s coattails, Keith said “God doesn’t have any grand children.” Also Keith Green called Jesus “the world’s oldest living Jew.”

Also he said that he knew Jesus was real when it changed him! That was the miracle that proved it to Keith. And that the happiness he found when he turned Jesus has lasted when nothing else has.

Came across this link with an interesting “annual report” for starting a new year:

https://fsmisc.s3.ca-central-1.amazonaws.com/2022+AR.pdf

Eager for the start of the new year and to get back into sales activity. Also want to be more physically active. Since my visiting time in the hospital, my own desire to be healthier has increased!

On another topic, I seem to notice my own “depth” waxes and wanes throughout a day. I have thoughts that seem deeper or of more significance and then time passes and I can’t remember those thoughts again or feel their initial importance anymore. If I quickly take a note in the middle of the “deeper” moments, I can sometimes revisit that specific thought and recapture some granule of the importance I felt the thought deserved.

An example is that it has occurred to me several times that in doing things for those we love, that is love demonstrated. The thing itself isn’t important, except in its importance to the other. My daughter’s iPhone wasn’t unlocking for her, either by FaceID or her fingerprint. I asked her to remove the case and try again thinking the case may be ajar and depressing a side button. That didn’t work so I had her just turn it off and instructed her to turn it back on. I saw her moments later and asked if that worked and she said it did, almost as an afterthought… as if she had forgotten the interaction entirely.

So in caring for her real need (the phone won’t unlock) I was loving her and it is so banal, so pedestrian, so normal and not noteworthy. It’s buying the milk, dropping off an envelope at the post office that is out of the way, bringing something to my wife’s workplace that she forgot… it’s these countless little needs that we do for each other that isn’t “lovey-dovey” but actual practical needs that we serve each other with that demonstrates love.

Combining that practical method of caring for needs with this thought: humans desire to learn (and be lost) in the stories of others.

I think in my pride of individuality, I have wanted people to respect or listen to me for my own sake of existence.

But if loving others is serving them, then perhaps letting others interact with me “as a story” as in, they don’t need to know me, or understand all of me, but if just some portion of my service, my skills, my own stories can be of valve to them, then that’s perhaps the MOST effective way to express love.

“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.”
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1Cor.13.1,1Cor.13.3,1Cor.13.2&version=ESV