Watching The Office finale with my Dundie award by my side. So sad that it’s over :( (at Dunder Mifflin, Scranton)

abrahampark:

I can’t even begin to explain how painfully annoying, how excruciating, how nails-screeching-on-chalkboard of an experience this has been.

Something (my Mac) or someone (has to be someone near the level of troll lord) changed my sound settings so that the balance of the audio fades ever so slightly to the right.

It started out small. I would gently press my ears against my left speaker to compare the level of the sound to my right speaker. As the days passed, I started physically abusing my sound system, because from past experience, it seemed to work. This time, it was to no avail.

I moved on to headphones, thinking my sound system had given out. Surely, the sound would be okay with my headphones, right? What are the odds that both my speakers and my headphones would be broken on the left side? As I placed the headphones in my ears, I was met with only more pain.

Today, I decided to look at my Mac’s sound settings. This is what I found.

I gasped. Out loud. To myself. In my room. Alone.

For the past month or so, I found myself giving into the lie that I was slowly going deaf in my left ear. Do you understand the physical and mental toll that has on someone? It drove me nuts. I foam in the mouth just thinking about it right now. Deep down inside, I knew there was something that was right, a perfect setting. There was such thing as a balanced sound and I was longing for it.

And yet, ironically, even after I changed the balance to normal, my ears had become so attuned to hearing everything unbalanced, that when the sound was finally balanced, it didn’t sound right.

“Finally,” I thought to myself, “now things are going to sound right.”

But that’s not how it works. You see, very much like this situation with physical sound, I buy into small little spiritual lies that almost sound right. Once I keep feeding myself with these lies, I get used to it, but somewhere inside I know that this was not the way it always was. There was a time when things were sound.

So even when God exposes a lie to me, the truth has become so foreign that I have to relearn it. I must unlearn the lie.

To a self-righteous person like me that still has trouble being judgmental towards particular sins (ie: drunkenness, drugs addictions, etc.), it’s easy to see why Satan would use “small” lies to get to me, because that’s how the Pharisees fell, and this is the lie that most of them bought into:

“You’re not that bad.”

And I keep telling myself that, thinking that that is what God wants. He wants my holiness, my righteousness, my faithfulness. Like, he yearns for it or something, like he needs me to be a super-Christian for his sake.

But do you see how stupid that is? God doesn’t need me. He doesn’t need my praises. He doesn’t need me to read his Word. He doesn’t need me to pray to him, to talk to him. He doesn’t need me to do anything.

Yet, the beautiful thing is that he wants me to, because he knows that is what will give me the most joy in life. Because he loves me, even when I feel like God is some obtusely needy friend.

These things like prayer, reading the bible, having community, going to church, these aren’t things that we do for him. They are for us, from him. God knows when we pray to him, it will help us. He knows when we read the word, it will help us.

He doesn’t need it. I do. And He knows it. But do I? Do I truly understand the weight of this?

But praise God that even through my exposed weakness, I can stand and praise Jesus.

Three times I pleaded with the Lord, that it should leave me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. So, for the sake of Christ, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

2nd Corinthians 12:8-10.

He is my light, my strength, my song.

King’s Kaleidscope - Asaph’s Arrows

I’ve been obsessed with this album and thought I’d share