basta

You crave for something and don’t get it, you are jealous and envious of what others have got and you don’t possess it yourselves. Consequently in your exasperated frustration you struggle and fight with one another. You don’t get what you want because you don’t ask God for it. And when you do ask he doesn’t give it to you, for you ask in quite the wrong spirit—you only want to satisfy your own desires.

You are like unfaithful wives, flirting with the glamour of this world, and never realizing that to be the world’s lover means becoming the enemy of God! Anyone who deliberately chooses to love the world is thereby making himself God’s enemy. Do you think what the scriptures have to say about this is a mere formality? James 4:2-6

I read a guest opinion in the New York Times this morning with this lead sentence: IN my last year on Wall Street my bonus was $3.6 million — and I was angry because it wasn’t big enough. 

And the guy goes on to detail what this love of the world looks like tastes like and feels like. The nagging envy that woke him every morning.  I am uncertain what a deliberate choice looks like; most of us are more like lobsters in pots, slowly simmering away in our own juices until it is too late.

The unfaithful wives metaphor holds true…it is all about flirting. Batting eyelashes at the glitter but trying to stay just this side of the pretend line in the dust. But Christ explains that the lust of the eye is just as incriminating as the actual romp. We all live it in this image-driven society. The sidelong glance that shifts into fondling caresses that bubble up into green-sludge jealousy.

And where it all leads, at least in my life is ingratitude. It is all pornography, lies airbrushed into my mind, Lies that squeeze and twist all hopes of enough. It is never beautiful enough. Tasty enough. Clever enough. Exotic enough. Especially Him. 

Surely I have stilled and quieted my soul; Like a weaned child with his mother, Like a weaned child is my soul within me.