Keeping it real folks

I'm just gonna get real here friends, today I had a really down day. You know the kind where you suddenly for no reason feel like you are in the middle of an existential crisis, where your life feels like it has no meaning or purpose other than as the caretaker of the10 piles of laundry you continue to let stack up without folding and the maid to a household of unending "toy shrapnel" which seems to be strewn in every square foot of the house as if a dirty bomb full of legos and littlest pet shop animals literally exploded in your home. You know the kind of day where if one more creature be that a tiny human, a cat, dog or man touches me or sits on me or asks something of me one more time I am going to literally pull my hair out by the roots from my legs that haven't been shaved for three weeks or I am just going to let something bitter and full of wrath escape my lips like an arrow. It's the kind of day when I want to live from my center, from that place of joy and vision where I see my future and where I am going clearly in front of me, but instead, I just can't see past the 8,706 emails in my inbox (this is literally the last count at 10:30 pm this evening) because people, I am kind of a disorganized mess sometimes and I need someone to come over here and put some form to this home office of mine before I set fire to my computer. It has been a day when more than once I have raised my voice at members of my family or said things I regretted. It is a day when my soul again feels profoundly tired. It is a day when I feel like a failure and that messed up 8 track tape (I have a thing for the 70's) in my head has been altered to repeat every 2 hours or so the same phrases, "You are screwing up your kids, you will never reach your goals and dreams, you will always struggle and fall and be in want, you will never be good enough." It was that kind of day people. Those of you who know me, know I don't go around wearing my religion on my sleeve as a matter of conscience and respect to those who have been wounded by religion, but I have to share something amazing with you: But God...

As for you, don’t you remember how you used to just exist? Corpses, dead in life, buried by transgressions, 2 wandering the course of this perverse world. You were the offspring of the prince of the power of air—oh, how he owned you, just as he still controls those living in disobedience. I’m not talking about the outsiders alone; 3 we were all guilty of falling headlong for the persuasive passions of this world; we all have had our fill of indulging the flesh and mind, obeying impulses to follow perverse thoughts motivated by dark powers. As a result, our natural inclinations led us to be children of wrath, just like the rest of humankind.

4 But God, with the unfathomable richness of His love and mercy focused on us, 5 united us with the Anointed One and infused our lifeless souls with life—even though we were buried under mountains of sin—and saved us by His grace. 6 He raised us up with Him and seated us in the heavenly realms with our beloved Jesus the Anointed, the Liberating King. 7 He did this for a reason: so that for all eternity we will stand as a living testimony to the incredible riches of His grace and kindness that He freely gives to us by uniting us with Jesus the Anointed. 8-9 For it’s by God’s grace that you have been saved. You receive it through faith. It was not our plan or our effort. It is God’s gift, pure and simple. You didn’t earn it, not one of us did, so don’t go around bragging that you must have done something amazing. 10 For we are the product of His hand, heaven’s poetry etched on lives, created in the Anointed, Jesus, to accomplish the good works God arranged long ago. (From Ephesians 2, The Voice)