Chapter 2: "I Will Bear Your Dark Side" - UNFINISHED

I need to write a letter! I should be able to get to that this week, I just have to remember. This blog apparently also functions as a post-it note.

I have woken up at 2:30 AM the past two nights. . . and I have no idea why. I wonder what tonight will have in store; I don't have any evening activities, so I should get to bed at a normal time (not that I haven't done that yesterday or Monday). I don't know. It's just very strange. I've also been having very vivid, strange, and sometimes lucid dreams. I wonder if I'm getting sick (there's been a small lump in my throat in the mornings, and a random cough. . . NOOOOOOOOO).

However, I think I prefer strange dreams to sleep paralysis. If you've experienced that, you know how terrifying it is.

Anywho, you don't want to read about my sleep patterns. Off to the first gift: God's promise in the soldiers' spit.

Also, I just discovered a study guide with questions! So I'm going to go back to last night's entry and do some (if not all) of them, and do them today and from here on out.

I love it when there's something to focus me :)

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This chapter uses Beauty and the Beast as an analogy (yay!). We, as human beings, are the beast. "Ugly. Defiant. Angry. We do things we know we shouldn't do and wonder why we did them." Hmm. . . sounds like Romans 7.

HAH! And reading futher into the story, he mentions that verse. I'm such a dork.

He mentions a story about being a beast when driving. I think most everyone is guilty of that from time to time, myself included. We leave later than we expect to get somewhere, and therefore drive like maniacs and get angry at OTHER PEOPLE for daring to drive appropriately on the roads we are taking. Two things that I keep in my mind when I'm tempted to be this way: It's better to be Benjamin "late" than it is to be "the late BenBeck" (because after all, 85% of the people at my funeral are probably going to refer to me as BenBeck. . . but I don't really want to blog about my funeral haha). The second thing: God gives us red lights to slow us down, not only on the road, but in life. To me, the answer "wait" to a prayer is a red light. When we rush through life, we miss so much.

Anyway, back to the book. The soldiers were supposed to scourge and crucify Him, but what they did inbetween was so much more awful (look here for the whole description). By spitting on Him, they were not attacking His physical body but his emotional state. "They felt big by making Christ look small." And guess what? When we belittle others through any action (I doubt anyone reading this has spit on another human, but I bet everyone reading this has spread gossip about someone before, and sin is sin is sin) we are doing it to Jesus (a parable/story we all know; verse 40 specifically has this idea). And why? Because we have a sinful nature living inside of us. Sure, we can do good, but NO ONE can never do bad. "There is no one righteous; no, not one." We must resist the idea of comparing ourselves to one another: Christ has to be our standard. And no one will ever be perfect in the way He is.

What can we do then? I could go into the whole Romans thing about not giving into sin to increase grace and all that, but instead I'll stick with the book. If the soldiers' spit represents the evil in our hearts, we have to look at what happened. Christ took that spit to the cross with him. He didn't wipe it off. Even in Isaiah it says that He doesn't turn from mockery and spitting. He took it with Him. And, unlike Beauty, He chose to become the Beast so that we, the true Beasts, could become Beautiful.



Wow.




(OK, study guide stuff when I get home. . .)