Honesty, Honestly

For the sake of transparency, let's just get one thing straight. Sorry if banging on about projects I'm doing is ever annoying and comes across as self-righteous. It's not meant to, and if it does it's only because it's taken a lot of years to stop being lazy and apathetic about things outside my own navel and get involved. It will always seems like a miracle if anything good ever happens, so being part of that feels pretty exciting, and it's something I want my friends to feel too.

If 'first person' is your clearest perspective, if your story-telling is about your own experience, then some chapters will describe being pummelled to the ground, or there will be silence because of that pummelling. Sometimes, when the redemption kicks in, a chapter or two about the buzz seems reasonable. But sometimes, in at last letting off steam, it may sound more like a rant than a celebration*. And sometimes, when it points more to yourself than the thing you're excited by, it can appear that you're more excited by yourself than it!

Truly, I'm sorry if that has happened. I'm just constantly amazed if anything I ever touch can come to good. That is redemption. And drawing trees for a little girl in China? It's really easy, costs nothing practically, and isn't about me. And doing it made me cry, again, because it matters and I wanted you to be involved too.

The left hand is not meant to know what the right hand is doing, apparently, meaning just get on with loving but don't broadcast it. It's easy to forget that the messy side of life isn't the part we generally publish online, so the buzz can appear self-centred. If it does, it's only in amazement it happens at all.

It's because the mess exists that the good parts seem so worth talking about.

Honestly? This wouldn't exist without there being mess, honest to God.


* A friend of mine affectionately refers to these kind of words as 'the little darlings', with a gracious 'everything belongs' kind of humility, as Fr Richard Rohr teaches.


{Today's Soundtrack: Embrace - Gravity}