If you don’t know what this is based on, I apologize in advance for the insanity that follows…

You don’t have to eat the butchered French Toast I’ve tried to make or gnaw on my half-raw hash browns to know God never intended me to cook. However, did you know that there is a biblical precedent against men ever cooking?

It’s true.

God wants men to stay out of the kitchen. Women are the unquestioned authorities in the kitchen.

Who baked the bread when the three strangers stopped by Abraham’s tent? It wasn’t the father of our faith. He didn’t kneed to make the bread since Sarah was around.

Who made the meal when Jesus needed to take a load off? Not that dead beat Lazarus. It was Mary.

The only time Jesus let his disciples prepare dinner, one of them ended up turning him over to be killed. Not exactly the way you want to end a successful dinner party.

The only time we see a guy capably cook a meal is when Jesus cooks a few fish, but that’s post-Resurrection. When you’re God, you can cook. When you’re just a man, it’s impossible.

In the Bible, the kitchen has a very feminine feel.

I don’t know about you, but I’m thrilled about this biblical precedent that bans men from the kitchen. My wife is way better at following recipes and improvising. Life is way better when I’m obedient to the Bible—especially that clear precedent about keeping out of the kitchen.

Some men may whine and complain, “But I like cooking! It’s fun to cook with my wife in the kitchen.” Well, that’s too bad. The Bible is authoritative, and you can’t just ignore the clear precedent that every time we see someone in the kitchen, it’s not a dude.

There are other cases that may be tough, but obedience is the key here. Some delusional, rebellious men may threaten the exclusive role of women in the kitchen by claiming that God called them to cook. That’s surely just the sinful nature trying to disrupt our homes by threatening the authority and power of women. These men need to submit to their wives, handing over the oven mitts, spatulas, and pans.

Personally, grinding coffee is still a struggle for me. What should I do if my wife is still asleep and I can’t find a capable woman to grind my morning coffee for me? In such an urgent case, I think God is willing to make an exception since a proper female authority can’t be found.

However, there is a cost to our obedience. Some single men will need to munch on raw carrots. They may ask for leniency for the sake of their rumbling stomachs. I admit, it’s certainly difficult to know what the Bible would make of our modern ways of cooking with so little effort.

I suppose a microwave could be permitted for single men, but we’ll probably need to decide whether “nuking” something is technically cooking it. And then there are salads and sandwiches. A man could technically “assemble” these things without cooking them, but he should probably make them in the dining room or living room. The kitchen is the sole domain of the woman.

Perhaps the best lesson we can learn here is that God wants women to be the sole authorities in the kitchen.

Of course men and women are totally equal before God. Men are just not capable of handling the kitchen. I mean, give a guy a recipe for a cake and he’ll end up burning the house down. Despite their unquestioned equality with women, men have a different calling that is far away from the nurturing, life-giving domain of the kitchen. They are only capable of going to jobs where they need to either make stuff or sell stuff.

For the single men, I would say that the best thing for you is to marry and marry quick. You don’t want to unwittingly violate the clear commands of the Bible by accidentally assuming authority that you are incapable of handling in the kitchen? It may start out as a piece of bread in the toaster oven, but soon you may start adding cheese and sardines and corn chips and then who knows what you’ll end up eating.

This feminine feel to the kitchen is rooted in the Bible and consistent throughout scripture. Wouldn’t we feel silly if we ignored the clear commands of the Bible and actually let men have a place in the kitchen?

UPDATE: I just wanted to add that I hope this post helps us think about the complexity of interpreting the cultural aspects of the Bible. I admit the post is over the top, but sometimes hyperbole can be an effective way of seeing where our ideas take us.

I know that dragons aren’t necessarily on the tips of anyone’s tongues of late in our gender discussions, but I’ve heard enough about A) men protecting women and B) dragons standing in as part of the honorable man equation that it’s worth exploring.

It can be honorable to speak of “protecting” women. However, once we start speaking of men slaying dragons on behalf of their ladies, I find that the metaphor breaks down in some serious ways.

You see, I don’t believe in slaying dragons. I’m an English major.

When English majors are confronted with talk of contemporary dragon-slaying, they’re going to ask questions like this:

• Why are we obsessed with a Victorian reimagining of Medieval nobility?
• Why a dragon? Why not a tiger, grizzly bear, or angry camel?
• Does the dragon bear a certain literary value? Do dragons convey a sexual image of threatened chastity and honorable male sexuality? If there’s one thing that English majors know, it’s that sex is EVERYWHERE. So these dudes can either fess up to what sexual point they’re making with this dragon business or I’ll keep making suggestions.

Perhaps I’m just lazy, but I’m not the main character in the story that God’s writing. I was created to be a sidekick to a fellow sidekick. God didn’t make a hero and sidekick. He either made two heroes who work together or two sidekicks who help each other do things… like kick stuff in the side.

The more I look at how this protecting, chivalry, honor business ends up working out practically, we wind up with this dynamic where men are always in charge, watching out for the women, making the decisions, and figuring out what to do. Because when the dragon starts chomping on the peasants, the little woman isn’t going to beat him down with her spinning wheel.

Dragons are the business of men who have swords and muscles and facial hair.

Let’s take this metaphor of protection and manliness into the real world for a moment—where it basically falls to pieces.

Sometimes my wife has a rough day. Hey, she’s in graduate school and there are some crazy days she has to put in. I need to step it up and encourage her (I also do the cleaning and laundry, but I do them in awesome, manly ways that involve lots of violence and muscles).

Just the other day I was telling her how I could clearly see God working in her. That was a pretty nice, manly thing to do, eh?

But here’s the thing, I believe that my wife and I are equals. We learn from each other. We protect and support each other. And guess what? I was discouraged and insecure that day. So I told her about it. I mentioned that seeing her calling helped me accept that God has called me to write.

What followed was a very honest conversation about how we can both see God working in each other’s careers. It’s hard for us to see these things in ourselves, but when we look at each other, God’s hand couldn’t be clearer.

I needed my wife to protect me, to lead me, and to encourage me to keep on. She needed me too. We support each other, yielding and submitting as we sort out life together. To say I need to protect her as her dragon-slaying knight misses out on the mutual responsibility we have to guard one another.

We fight for one another in our marriage.

Before we lose ourselves in noble metaphors of mighty male, guardian knights who slay dragons for their ladies, let’s not forget that there are some dragons that only women can handle.

And maybe women really need to be defended from the people who say they’re defenseless.

Though most readers know her as Tamara Out Loud, Tamara Lunardo has made her noise by writing powerful, hilarious, and deeply honest blog posts that often leave her readers laughing out loud. We’re fortunate to have her guest post today:

I’ve heard it from both sides, each passionate, each convinced, each sure of God’s design.  I’ve heard them trace threads of their own theologies throughout the scriptures, winding them tightly around what they hold true. I’ve heard them tear up Paul’s letters over whether to permit a woman to speak, preach, teach, minister, or lead. I have heard them and heard them and heard them, and I am tired of hearing it.

I am tired of the arguments, the anger, the divisions, the hurt; I am tired of it all. And so I think the most subversive thing I can do amid the fight is to do what I am passionate about, what I am convinced of, what I am sure is God’s design: I can write. I can write because God gifted me to, and when He gives you a gift, you do not debate the merits of using it. You say a humbled thank-you, and then you use it.

And when I write, a funny thing happens: Neither complementarian nor egalitarian need argue. God permits a woman to speak.

When I write stories of Jesus’ meeting me at the well or of His barging in on my Damascus road, God permits a woman to preach. When I write stories of seeing grace light dark places or of learning love in unexpected form, God permits a woman to teach. When I write stories of painful struggle or of raucous laughter, God permits a woman to minister. When I write stories of baring raw honesty or of poking at man-made taboo, God permits a woman to lead.

When I write, God permits a woman to speak, and I am only a whisper in a beautiful, growing chorus.

When God permits a woman to lead, people can share stories long pressing their hearts because they first saw me share mine. When God permits a woman to minister, hurting hearts who would not venture inside a church building can find community in my written spaces. When God permits a woman to teach, a worship leader can pray new hope with thoughts I have put to paper. When God permits a woman to preach, a pastor can reach his congregation with a sermon infused with my imagery.

And for now this is enough; I don’t need to hear the arguments. God permits a woman to speak, and I do.

About Today’s Blogger

Tamara works out her thoughts on life and faith at TamaraOutLoud.com, occasionally with adult language, frequently with attempted humor, and hopefully with God’s blessing. Editor of What a Woman is Worth through Civitas Press, she holds a BA in English and her five children, when they let her; she almost never holds her tongue.

About the Women in Ministry Series

The Women in Ministry Series is a collection of guest posts that aims to:

• Provide an alternative to the women in ministry debates by telling the stories of women in ministry.
• Encourage women to explore their God-given callings.

You can stay updated on the latest post each week by signing up for the weekly e-mail list. (You also get a free E-book!)

Comment Policy: Everyone is welcome to leave a comment. However, this series takes for granted that women are called by God into every facet of ministry. This is not the place to debate that point and such comments will be removed. Women have been told “no” in far too many places. This is one place that is committed to saying “yes.” For more about the comment policy, read here.

Next Week’s Blogger: Cortney Dale

Some people are talented at making money. I, on the other hand, have the unique talent of choosing highly specialized professions that don’t make any money.

When I started attending seminary, the typical conversation with my family was something like, “How will you avoid becoming a beggar on the street?” OK, it wasn’t quite like that, but way too many conversations had those overtones.

Thankfully, I had plenty of pastors to look up to over the years. They seemed like reasonably well-adjusted individuals with normal lives. It wasn’t until I started working in a church and saw pastoral ministry up close that I realized it wasn’t for me.

I kept my misgivings to myself and my wife, not wanting the “beggar on the street” conversation to further evolve. As I searched for a new path forward, I realized that the obvious answer was writing full time. This did very little to assuage the concerns of my family.

When I started to pursue writing as a serious profession, I didn’t know any writers personally. How does one go about making a living as a writer? I could handle the part where I pounded out 5,000 words in a day, but the part where a paycheck ended up in my bank account eluded me. I had never seen the life of a writer up close and personal, and I had no idea how to go about pursuing my calling.

Enter writing blogs, books, and magazines. For years I inhaled Writer’s Digest, The Writer, and a bunch of writing blogs and books. These stories of professional writers became my lifeline. When people wondered how I could ever make it as a writer, I received support and encouragement from the stories of writers who kept up the struggle and dreamed up creative ways to make a living.

Without those stories, I would have given up on my calling a long time ago. If I didn’t know that there were other crazy people like me who loved to write and didn’t mind the spare pay checks, I would have been forced to settle for a soul-crushing job that didn’t tie into my passions.

Without stories, it’s hard to know if we’re on the right path. We need to know that other people have faced similar circumstances and have kept up the fight. We need to know that it’s worth the struggle.

As I’ve thought about the importance of the Women in Ministry Series that will be launched this Friday, the value of stories have been at the forefront of my mind. Women who feel called to ministry need to read stories about those who have blazed the path ahead of them. Women who have been told “no” all of their lives need to read stories that tell them “yes.”

Perhaps the most difficult part of this process has been contacting some very talented storytellers about contributing, only for them to reply that they don’t have any stories to share about women ministering in their lives. It never occurred to me that there are women who simply haven’t seen a God-empowered female ministering as either a pastor or a lay minister in the church.

That left me wondering how many women are struggling with a nudge from God that they simply can’t process. Are there women who sense a call into ministry, but they can’t sort it out because they’ve never seen it modeled for them?

As I think and pray over all that this series of stories about women in ministry can be, I hope that it will become a lifeline to women who need models. I hope that readers can share links with those who need encouragement and a few examples of what it’s like for God to work through women in the church.

And then, when a well-meaning relative asks a young woman, who is planning to go into ministry, how she will eat or find a place to live, she can smile and know that she has a treasure trove of stories assuring her that God will show her a path forward.

I think these folks don’t know what they’re really saying.

These folks may have an idea in their minds of what this looks like, but if you asked them to really explain such things in detail, the training wheels of these undeveloped thoughts fall off.

I’ve been thinking about all of this for years now, and yesterday I finally put some thoughts together…

Generalizations about Generalizations

Perhaps the greatest limitation to such statements about the state of the church or particularly masculine or feminine traits is the limits of each person’s perspective. How many Christians and churches do we really know? Through my travels I’ve attended about 10 different churches and studied ecclesiology in seminary, and I still don’t feel like I have a handle on vast trends in Christianity.

Can we really speak with any kind of certainty about “the problem with the church” today?

The only generalization I feel comfortable making is that generalizations are generally unhelpful. One need only take a survey from who knows where and mix it with a personal anecdote to diagnose the church with a far-sweeping problem that can only be solved by an overly simplistic, half-baked idea.

Do We Have Problems with Men and Women in the Church?

This is a tougher matter to zero in upon, since so many people mean something different when speaking of a crisis with men or an overly “feminized” church. On the one hand, we can all agree that the church should have men and women fully involved in its ministry in one way of another. If one group is significantly more involved than the other, it’s fair to ask “why?”

However, once we start criticizing women for making the church too feminine, we run into a few major problems.

First of all, what exactly do we mean by “feminine”? The way the term is used, there’s an underlying assumption that feminine is naturally weak and bad, while masculine is strong and good. Lost in the shuffle are the deeper nuances of gender and the various exceptions we run into every day, such as when we meet a man who is very nurturing or a woman is very aggressive. I don’t think we really can pin down specific definitions here for masculine or feminine since real people defy them.

Secondly, any criticism about the church being too feminine begs the question, “How did women become so involved in the church?” I’m not a sociologist, but I’d guess that the social models of the 1950’s and 60’s (and beyond) had something to do with it. The men ran off to have careers and to drink beer in the back yard while the women raised families and kept the church going—or something like that.

Men complaining that the church became too feminine while they worked 50-60 hour weeks strikes me as a slap in the face to every woman who has served God in the church. Of course women are going to run most of the committees if the men are working all week!

Our Real Problem?

If we do have a problem with men not getting involved in the church, we at least don’t have a “feminine” church problem. We have men with a Holy Spirit problem. My guess is that every church is going to look a bit different, but so long as men are working long days and women are not, what do we expect will happen at our churches?

I’m not saying that men won’t be led by the Holy Spirit to work a normal week at the office. We need men and women to follow the Spirit wherever the Spirit leads them. I’m saying that we can’t blame women for becoming so involved in the church—as if men are the victims of women initiating a takeover of some sort where they prod pastors to do their bidding.

If we are going to have balanced congregations where men and women serve together in a relatively equal manner, our only hope is the leadership of the Spirit, not some vague notion of men becoming more manly or women somehow becoming less feminine. Such proclamations about masculinity and femininity make no sense and do us no good.

I’m far less concerned with “real” manhood or “real” womanhood. In the life given by Christ Jesus there is neither male nor female, and as a result the gifts of the Spirit are equally provided to us all.

May we find our true calling through the gentle whisper of the Spirit and ignore the loud voices clamoring for a gender-based counterfeit.

When certain people read that I’m putting together a series of guest posts about women in ministry, they may be tempted to think and say that I’m out to destroy the Bible, nay Christianity itself. They may assert that I’m misconstruing clear passages from the Bible based on loose speculation and undermining the very faith I claim to support.

If women are allowed to teach and serve as equals in ministry, what will become of Christianity and the church? I’ve conducted a very thorough risk assessment of my series that kicks off next week, and such detractors are certainly right. There are tons of risks. Here are just a few that I’ve thought of:

Under the cold-hearted leadership of female leaders and ministers, men will be rounded up and locked in the nursery. Children will puke on their shiny shoes. Pastors will lose their expense accounts. Secretaries will stop answering the phone.

THE COFFEE WILL NOT BE MADE!!!

Yes, it is a terrible thing when sinners fall into the hands of an “angry woman.”

Sermons will start to include illustrations based on raising kids and cooking dinner instead of sports and war movies. Women will start to speak their minds to the male authority figures in their lives, thereby causing strain on men who are forced to utilize neglected parts of their brains. Men will have to start vacuuming better, moving the chairs out instead of just going around them. Dinners will not be cooked. Children will stop eating their vegetables.

Dangerous heresies will sweep through the church by “easily deceived” women—just like Eve. In fact, women will start forcing their husbands to eat apples all of the time. The line for the men’s restroom will become oppressive. The parking lot with become a scrap heap of twisted vehicles piled upon one another. The back rows will buckle and break under the weight of disinterested, dispirited men who feel like the church is way too feminized.

Without a man to wear a suit up front, men will no longer know how to dress on Sunday morning. First they’ll forget their ties, and then they’ll soon denigrate to stained t-shirts, slippers, and dirty Carhartts. They’ll stop reading their Bibles because they’ll become convinced that only a woman can interpret it for them. They’ll stop signing up to lead anything in the church. Even the hunting group will be organized through the cabal of the lady’s knitting group. Camouflage will be replaced by knit teddy bear sweaters. Venison dinners will be replaced by crusty, inedible scones and fruity teas.

Yes, letting women teach, speak in church, hold authority, or call themselves “ministers” in any sense of the word could destroy Christianity as we know it. And even if my little series of stories about women in ministry won’t do any of the things I mentioned above, I do hope it destroys part of Christianity as we know it—the part where women think they are somehow designed by God to be inferior to men.

This will be a destructive series. However, we’re not destroying something for the fun of it. This is a matter of obligation, a dirty job that someone has to do: undoing the wrongs of the past and restoring women to their proper place in the church through empowering stories.

I’m not interested in forcing anyone to join me in this. I know there are some men and women who are comfortable with male-dominated systems. That’s fine for them. I’m not forcing them to change anything. I’m far more interested in speaking to the women and men who think there is something wrong with that—who sense in their times of prayer and readings of scripture that God created men and women to be equal partners in salvation, ministry, and the home.

And really, what’s the worst thing that could happen? A woman may discover her calling into ministry?

Years of being blessed with a low checking account balance forced me to rethink my approach to Christmas. Those were not easy years as I tried to tell myself that Christmas isn’t all about the presents, while fearing that my family would consider me cheap or inconsiderate.

A budget gift is a budget gift.

In a happy case of irony, my focus on gift-giving lead me back to a better conception of Christmas.

If art thrives on limitation, gift-giving followed suit. If I only had ten dollars to spend on each person, I had to ask very different questions for gift-giving, the most important being: “What would this person never buy for himself/herself?”

This lead to a series of time-consuming projects such as homemade applesauce, unique jams, hot sauce, and framed photographs. Everything was tailored to the specific needs of each person and in most cases kept us within our budget.

The first time I gave my grandmother a jar of homemade applesauce, she opened it right away and burst into tears at the first taste. She hadn’t eaten homemade applesauce since the last time her mother had made it. My mom guards her jar of blueberry jam, while my in-laws don’t miss a meal without their hot sauce.

As we’ve reached greater financial security, we’ve been able to spend more money on gifts, but our question remains the same. Oddly enough, the homemade gifts are still a big hit. In addition, we’ve begun to keep our Christmas spending under control by joining together with family members to buy one large gift that someone would never purchase on his/her.

I organized some pretty epic purchases that both met a relative’s need and ensured a minimum investment—the biggest ticket item being a computer for my wife before she entered graduate school. I’d share some examples from this year, but I don’t want to spoil the surprise for anyone.

Ironically, the more I’ve thought about my gift-giving strategy, the more I’ve been drawn away from focusing on giving gifts and pondering the power of God. Isn’t Christmas all about the power of God to do for us what we could never do for ourselves?

I love the promise that Gabriel made to Mary, “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.”

God overshadows us. He breaks into our gift-giving madness to remind us that our iPads will one day break, our E-readers will be replaced, our shirts will unravel, and even our jams will go rotten. We can’t beat greed, materialism, and selfishness on our own. We’ll keep thinking that these bits of technology and clothing are what we really need.

God knows that we need to overshadowed. We need him to overcome every competing desire in our life. Only he can overshadow every idol that tries to replace those quiet moments where we sense that the loving touch of God is what we were made to experience, even if we think we’ll be fulfilled by touching what we have made.

There is incredible joy in giving someone a gift that he could never acquire on his own. In fact, meeting a real need is the best kind of gift giving. God knew that when he overshadowed Mary with his power and sent us a Savior as the greatest gift—doing something we could never accomplish on our own.

May we find that joy both in our relationships with God and with one another. May we find what only God can give and meet needs that would otherwise remain.

This post is part of World Vision’s 12 Blogs of Christmas Project about the true spirit of Christmas. In order to learn more real needs that you can meet this Christmas season, check out the World Vision Catalogue.

Do you have your own story about the true spirit of Christmas? Share it today at the World Vision blog.

One of my fondest memories of seminary is lunch time. The first generation Korean students gathered at a table and opened their Tupper wares to share with one another. I was even invited to pick up some chop sticks in join them at times.

Meanwhile, the occasional middle-aged pastor who had forgotten to bring a lunch would survey the vending machines with dread, knowing that the cheeseburger in a plastic bag would be his best option. He delayed that decision as long as possible.

Once a month we had a guest speaker come for a pizza lunch. Just about the entire seminary turned out for these events, filling the cafeteria and giving us all a chance to see each other and to catch up. These lunches gave us something that is essential when a bunch of people from a variety of backgrounds and relationships gather together to talk about God: relationships.

Do We Speak Truth in Relationships?

I love the way that ideas and conversations can spread on the internet, but the most significant drawback is the relational void that can occur in some online “conversations.” That isn’t to say that relationships can’t happen—they do. I’m just saying that we can now enter into conversations where we know nothing of the people participating in them.

Consequently, we don’t understand where someone is coming from and we’re not all that invested in seeking the best for that person. We just see a pile of text that challenges something important to us. There’s no prospect of seeing that pile of text at the next community lunch.

The Difference That Relationships Make

I’m certainly all for sharing my ideas online and hearing out those who disagree with me. However, I’ve observed some interesting dynamics. For example, though I’m a committed Arminian, many of my closest friends since childhood remain Calvinists. Although my childhood church is complementarian in their views toward women, and I have changed to egalitarian, I would pay close attention to the opinions of my pastors should they even contact me with a concern about my writing.

It actually can be quite easy to be friends with people we know who believe differently from us. Of course we all have experienced exceptions to this.

Who Should We Listen To?

As a general rule, I put the most stock in the opinions of the people who know me the best. Starting with my wife and some family members, I also pay close attention to friends, pastors, and colleagues. It is both unhealthy and impossible to acknowledge every opinion online as a kind of authority for our lives, and yet, it’s often tempting to do just that—even if we think we need to challenge these voices.

Who Should We Ignore

The tricky part about blogging is that I need to remain open to conversations with folks from a variety of perspectives, but I also can’t let a challenge from someone who doesn’t know me rattle my cage. I can’t lose sleep over the stuff coming from denominational leaders, celebrity pastors, and groups that would condemn someone like me.

They’re free to believe as they wish and I recognize their place in the church, but their critiques are also irrelevant to me. They have nothing invested in my own spiritual growth or the growth of my community, and therefore the best thing I can do is to seek accountability among those who desire to see myself and my community grow. While I seek guidance from perspectives outside of those who agree with me, a relational investment is critical.

Recognizing the Benefits of Authority

Having set some boundaries around the opinions I care most about, I want to make it clear that within the confines of relationships and becoming personally invested in one another, I also highly value the place of authority. We all need pastors and friends who care enough about us to challenge us to change. Tomorrow I’ll write about the freedom that comes from loving, relational authority.

You can evade legal trouble while keeping it cool and classy with the new “Mars Hill Whatevah”®  logo for your church.

This sleek, black logo will remind your fellow litigants that Christians really shouldn’t sue one another, and that you’re not going to take their threatening letters seriously.

Interested in using this copyrighted logo for your church?

No problem! Just download the image, plant a church, and you’re good to go! Best yet, you won’t have to worry that I’ll send my massive team of lawyers after you!

Notes for Readers

For the full scoop on where this joke is coming from, see JesusNeedsNewPR and the original post.

The final straw arrived last night—the one that breaks the camel’s back. Like an angry camel I flopped onto the ground flailing and spitting. Proverbially spitting that is.

Or are llamas the ones who spit?

Regardless of the spitting involved, I hit my limit last night. Enough things had gone wrong, enough projects had piled up, enough incidental circumstances had mounted to the point that I snapped.

The crazy thing is that under normal circumstances, the final straw was actually a pretty good thing tinged with a few problems. It was something that I would normally thank God for. But oh last night, I didn’t need one more thing to do. One more urgent deadline was too much after pushing to meet more deadlines than I could count. The constant urgency of one thing after another got to me.

I stomped out of the house because I needed to break my little pity party. I needed… Mediterranean food. I could try to tie this back to my camel metaphor (I mean, where else would a camel in Columbus go?), but I’ll just stop things there since I ate a lamb wrap.

A few hours later I had some perspective.

I hadn’t prayed about things. I’d just reacted. It was alright that I recognized a need for a change of scenery, but it took me far too long to realize that some of the things that had pushed me over the edge were essentially answers to my prayers.

I just didn’t expect those answers to my prayers to arrive along with all of this other junk.

So now I just feel like an ungrateful jerk who asks God for stuff and then doesn’t even recognize it when it arrives. In fact, I had the audacity to see his blessings as a problem.

I feel like I need to channel my inner Ann Voskamp and work on this gratitude thing. My spirit runs dry for want of gratitude and worship.

My mother-in-law once said that we overcome sin and the schemes of the enemy with worship. And if I was honest with myself, something that is not a guarantee, I’d have to say my “woe is me” attitude is a pretty good sign that I’ve been a tad self-absorbed lately.

I need to redirect my worship to where it belongs.